Where do you live?

Karina Põdra

In search of ideas for the project on the topic „Outside“ I tried to define the edges of the Outside and got stuck asking myself what it actually is. A mysterious place where you have to wear pants? Must be something more complex than that. A place where you’re not Inside anymore? Brilliant idea, captain! So I went on looking for the definition of the Inside, which did not seem much easier. I sought for a criterion. Is it where you are welcome? Well, not necessarily. Is it where you are safe? I hope, not only there. Free? Are you free there though? A place where you’re loved? Where you belong? Where are those at all?

So I came to the thought that all these ideas have nothing to do with the intuitive understanding of the Outside and the Inside. Moreover, they barely correlate with each other and sometimes are even mutually exclusive. Quite sad, isn’t it? Something always seems to be missing. If we chose to see the Inside as an abstract area where a certain criterion is fulfilled, we would probably jump from one to another throughout the day staying outside of something most of the time. If the perfect Inside was defined by all those criteria, where would You be living?

The absence strikes harder than the presence. The phrases are supposed to show this confrontation, the moment when you stumble upon the border of the Inside and find yourself outside: when you’re loved, but not free; or safe, but unwelcome. The audio background is there to make you feel just as uncomfortable.

All the phrases are based on true stories.

Maybe something pops up in your mind when you’re reading this? What are you limited in? What are you outside of when you find yourself within something else? Where does your border between the Outside and the Inside lie? Please, share something with me in the form of a story or a phrase and it might appear among the others.

The artwork was created within the course Artistic Practice on the Chair for Visual Arts
of the Technical University of Munich, SoSe 2020.

Project supervision: Stefan Wischnewski.