“What about pockets as a safe space?” is an on-going project questioning safety and intimacy in living environments for international students. The project consists of a home-kit for researching how objects and their emotional values contribute to creating humane surroundings and (un)safe feelings during their nomadic experiences.
In the impermanent scenario, we live in nowadays, finding a safe space might be very significant, but also delicate and problematic. What about pockets as a safe space? is an ongoing project questioning safety and intimacy in living environments for international students. It is developed using a garment as a metaphor of the shelter, where the body can settle as the inhabitant of a room. Every time we move from place to place we enter a new empty shelter, a new empty room. When we arrive, we open our luggage and boxes, and then we position our items through the room to transform the empty shelter into our private space. Spreading the items through the space of the room we inhabit the empty shelter and we personalize our privacy. In this project, we translated the empty room into an empty garment with a lining full of pockets. In this translation from the room to the garment, we imagine pockets as drawers and shelves which can be filled in with personal objects. By using pockets as a research tool, we engage the participants to reframe the definition of space and give personal interpretations. Collecting diverse experiences of safety, through the garment, we provide an overview of the intricacy of the topic within the current society.
The drawers are the pockets of the furniture
and the pockets are the drawers of the clothes.
Sometimes you're looking for something in one drawer
and it's in another pocket.
Some drawers are kept very tidy
the stuff in the pockets goes where you want it.
The house is a big garment where
you live in it all in one piece
excluding the life on the terrace
while the dress is a house
that leaves your head and your hands out
sometimes even your feet
at the seaside you're almost all out of the house.’
Bruno Munari, Pensare confonde le idee, (Mantova: Corraini, 1993).
‘I cassetti sono le tasche dei mobili
e le tasche sono i cassetti dei vestiti.
Talvolta cerchi qualcosa in un cassetto
e invece è in un’altra tasca.
Alcuni cassetti sono tenuti molto in ordine
la roba nelle tasche va dove vuole.
La casa è un grande abito nel quale
ci vivi dentro tutto intero
esclusa la vita in terrazza
mentre il vestito è una casa
che ti lascia fuori la testa e le mani
certe volte anche i piedi
al mare sei quasi tutto fuori casa.’
(Bruno Munari)
Created by Alessandra Varisco & Lu Lin
The article was originally published by APRIA.