"Nomadographies" Wearable Homes

April 20, 2008

The Wearable Homes were a response to the realities of living in a country where there is still not a safety net for so many people. As both a climate change prediction and an assumption that more people will lack access to basic resources, the “Wearable Homes” project bordered on an absurd dystopic commentary about what consumption could look like after most everything imaginable had been marketized and sold, and people navigated through desertified terrains.

Growing up in a fairly mobile home I have always considered mobility as either choice or necessity, with little in-between. In school in Portland, Oregon in the year 2000, I began making and implementing tools for a future existence upon learning of Bechtel’s privatization of water in Bolivia. Learning about that really affected me, as I’ve always been very close to living on the edge of necessity and understood that there were many things I didn’t know how to do to obtain basic resources, such as collect and clean water, a problem I had grown up with at home. Extending this proposal to the rest of the world in the not-so-distant future, I started designing simple water collection and purification devices for decentralized systems that empowered a person with regular skills, who had to make it and then use it. I would take them to the desert in Oregon and test them. From there, I began constructing these suits called Wearable Homes and documenting myself using them in extreme natural conditions, understanding that these conditions may be more prevalent and widespread in the future. They began as cocoon-like tents that could be worn for easy carry and then deployed. They quickly got bigger, more abstract and in fact monstrous in most cases. I documented them being used. They became metaphors for a future based on the most rudimentary and distorted survival.

Nomadographies, 2008