Home Squat Home is a performance installation for storytelling using shadow puppetry and light projections on the surface of a tent. The participants choose from 2 sets of stories to experience: HO’s Letter to Generations Before ME or HO’s Letter to Generations After ME. This piece is inspired by the artists’ personal memories, identities, and relations to the DTES and the South Korean cities they resided in. The stories bring together personal and collective memories, traumatic observations of capitalist societies’ systemic failures, desires for true care and changes manifested by grassroots movements. The piece imagines the tent as shelter and rally spot, a po-tent city transforming into a city square, a forest, a tomb, and a womb.
Home Squat Home is about human-beings’ relation to ourselves, others, and the earth. The conditions that bring us closer to the earth, or alienate us from it, are the essential roots of this piece. The project extends its life when the tent is donated to a DTES community.
This piece was originally planned to engage audiences through intimate live performances and zines in Woodward’s Atrium on May 22nd & 24th 2020, and at DTES Small Arts Grants community events in June. In light of COVID-19, these plans turned into 2 zoom presentations of in-process live performances and discussion in June. We also launched an online zine shop in July!
Artistic Team:
Creator/performer: Minah Lee & Wryly Andherson
Zine mentor: Hue Nguyen
DTES Small Arts Grants 10th Anniversary Virtual Gallery
The artists appreciate funding received from the DTES Small Arts Grants Program and Vancouver Foundation.