Today’s society is defined by an infinite set of cultural and material rules, trends, events and developments. But our society may be most defined by it’s residue, the clearly visible amounts of waste. Goods and products that were once necessary and wanted, are easily discarded the next moment. Some of these products are thrown away and end up as land fill, others start a new, second life with it’s new owners. And again, and again, …
What may be rubbish or rubble to one, may be very usable for another, because Western society is marked by a high level of luxury and wealth for one, and yet by poverty and hardship for many others.
The project Less@Home aims to visualize this contrast between rich and poor and the recycling of goods by porting interior settings to the public domain. A bathroom in the surf of the North Sea, a poker table in a forest, a mother nursing her baby in an alley. All easily recognizable sets and settings are built with recycled furniture and props, thus making the viewer uncomfortably aware of the ones in our society to whom the rules of comfort and wealth do not apply: the large numbers of homeless people that live on the streets of every major city in the world.
Homeless people crowd our squares and parks, live under our bridges and behind our houses. They live right on our doorsteps, the place that we consider the public domain. Yet, most of us tend to ignore them, handing them a few coins for coffee (or beer!) or taking a street paper off their hands at best. Their living rooms are in front of our houses, their bedrooms just around the corner.
By re-building their homes on streets and squares, in parks and forests, Less@Home emphasizes on the bizarre phenomenon of two parallel societies: the one we all know – of people with a roof over their head, and the one we dread of ending up in – the one of the people that live on the streets.












