The term “Not Under my Roof” is an admonition. This cannot happen in or to the home. But we know it does happen. Always. The cliché is the title for an extraordinary installation by Sean Cordeiro and Claire Healy recently exhibited in “Optimism” (2008-2009) at GoMA Queensland. A trace of a humble abode literally and ironically dominated the grand palatial walls of the long gallery/avenue that looks out to the Brisbane River. Developed and managed from Berlin, this commissioned project work continues the artists’ exploration of the processes of compression and distillation as it relates to the production and lifespan of materials in the everyday world. “Not Under my Roof” (2008) was a tin and wood construction, a home once called “Linaine” for several generations of South Queensland farming families. Contemporary agricultural methods have made the small land holding economically unviable so the farmhouse was abandoned and the family moved to a larger home which was the centre of 5 conjoined properties. No one had lived in the house for seven years. As realised for the exhibition, the house was cut 30cms from the floor transported and relocated and then placed horizontally onto the gallery wall. Like a giant blueprint, the sculpture gained a graphic almost painterly presence, which was compounded by the survival of the original floor coverings.
The home is a primal space. While the domestic environment simply and sometimes conveniently, provides Cordeiro and Healy with a vast array of materials and objects to measure, note, transport and reconfigure- our psychological, metaphoric and symbolic associations with the home are also vast. It was the 1st century Roman rhetorician Quintilian (1) who advised orators to imagine walking through the spaces of a house or palace as way to spur the memory. Each was a container of information, of learning and experience.
The home is a place of infinite routine. There are habits that arise that create a sense of safety. All homes have time-honoured pathways to the television entertainment unit, to the bathroom, around the kitchen table or negotiating old Aunt Peggy’s ugly bureau that does not quite fit in the hall. We develop body awareness so that drunk or sleepy, this habituation to spaces and objects precludes many accidents. Dust (85% skin) accumulates over surfaces in kitchens and bathrooms, dust and oil intermingle to become grime and settles to become embedded within the architectural fabric. Smells, patterns of light, the very tangibility and familiarity of objects within the home are “lightening rods” for memory (2). Self and object becomes blurred. The home as embodied narrative is ruptured with death or relocation. All of these associations and recognitions swirl around the encounter with “Not Under my roof”(2008). Here is a house that had never been experienced in such a way. We are witness to patterns of inhabitation. With this god’s eye vision, the artists allow us to see that evidently everything occurs under my roof!
Cordeiro and Healy’s new installation “Life Span” for the 2009 Venice Biennale is another tightly focused meditation on the wheel of life. While astrophysicists muse over the existence of the particle zoo, the brown dwarf and Standard Model Neutrinos, what constitutes their dark matter is much closer to home. A black reliquary looms large in the space of a deconsecrated chapel. The sheer bulk of this monolith both reaches for and denies the ethereal grace of the fresco above – a conflict of apotheosis and inexorable grounded-ness. “Life Span” is a work is not only about the weight of history (the piece actually weighs about 30 tonnes!) but also about how we can understand history or times passage. Stacked in front of the viewer is 67 years of VHS tape recordings. This is the average length of the human lifespan. For artists whose leitmotif is compression they have found a perfect vehicle in the VHS tape. The work also has an internal mathematical logic – units, numbers, calibration, outcomes- formal qualities that appeal to Cordeiro and Healy. However these objects have not yet gained the nostalgic cachet as vinyl records. So effective has been the technological advances that superseded VHS, the artist’s found it quite difficult to collect the required number of tapes to realise the project. Because the tapes and the casing comprise of 6 different types of plastic they are not easily or profitably recycled. Consequently most VHS tapes outside of specialist libraries and older peoples’ homes reside in landfill sites.
“Life Span” is literally a glowering mass of magnetic energy and petrochemical excess. The physicality of the plastic surfaces of the VHS components is either precious, still shiny and new or matte and scratched through loving over-use. As in all Cordeiro and Healy’s work, the trace of the human remains. The mass produced industrial forms are personalised with stick on labels or hand written notes, often crossed out and re-written. There is the desperate instruction DO NOT TAPE OVER! Some of the labels are revealed to tantalizingly intimate the content of what is a peculiar and unique archive. There are Hollywood blockbusters, porn, iconic but now ancient iconic Australian television programs such as “The Wheel of Fortune”, “Cop Shop” and “Blue Heelers”, there are exercise videotapes, and tapes from the CSIRO radio telescope recordings. This eclectic pile is ripe for further examination and taxonomical organisation. Cordeiro and Healy are the initial archaeologists, they have found the site, the grave goods so to speak, they leave it up to other specialists to interpret and decipher the mysterious auguries revealed by the memento-mori.
Like most of their projects “Life Span” has had a long gestation. As long-time collaborators the artists have developed a process of notation in formbooks where an exchange of ideas can grow, waiting for the right combination of location and materials to “speak” to them. For example the Ludoteca which in Italian, means playroom, is an immediate reference back to the home its rituals and habits. In many ways the VHS player was the last consistent location for family communication. New technologies encourage a more private relationship to the screen and to entertainment. What better location than deconsecrated chapel to raise issues about time, mortality, obsolescence and decay?
In a sense this artist collaboration re-presents notions of the archive and the document and so work within a post-conceptualist heritage (Dan Grahame, Gordon-Matta Clark are amongst their favourite artists). However what is compelling about Cordeiro and Healy’s practice, essentially mechanistic productions of displacement, with attendant formal and logistic conundrums, is that it evokes such emotional and sentimental responses. For the artists though, the creation of nostalgia is a serendipitous but largely unintentional by-product not the motivating force of their installation projects. However they are keenly aware of the contemporary obsession with the document. Somewhat ruefully, they noted in recent conversation, “We go to parties now where there more cameras than people’(3). For Sean Cordeiro and Claire Healy, all types of objects and materials are information-laden survivors, data and “intelligence”.
Notes
1. Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria. Translated by H. E. Butler. Vol. 4. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961. First published 1922.
2. Robert L. and Patricia Parmalee. “Attachment to Place and the Representation of the Life Course by the Elderly.” in Place Attachment, edited by Irwin Altman and Setha M. Low, 134–63. New York: Plenum, 1992.p.153
3.Thankyou to the artists for their generous time in conversation with author March 2009

This essay was published in Dark Matter 2009