Caro Simon

This project explores the notion of movement and migration. It addresses the notion of not-home/ home, that is, being both grounded and never quite finding yourself at home. I traveled a lot on my own to study (to four different countries in five years) and always juggled with this idea of constant motion and staticity, of never feeling at home. It touches upon feelings of nostalgia and homesickness. The exposed static sole of the bent shoe and it’s broken mirror reflect upon the disruption that migration causes. It invites the viewer to reflect on the story, the places and the person it contained. I see the shoe as a container, something fillable while the rain fills, it’s a source. Both are elements of the exterior, the outside, the places you confront and negotiate with. The link established between the word « rain » and the shoes is one of a cycle of movement and energy, interrupted by staticity. The soundscape thus serves as a representation of my accute alertness to city sounds, it explores the different idiosyncratic sounds of the cities I lived in, that both comfort and haunt me. It is an amalgam of transit noises from the TTC, the wind, rain, records of my neighbours dancing on a flamenco song in Cadix (Spain), a conversation with an old man in Liège in Belgium about laughing, I knitted a story of constant renegotiation of the self in migration. I am stuck in the rain, stuck in the motion of transit, stuck in this microcosm. The wool string serves as a soft connection to home. It is the distance between Luxembourg and Toronto (6205km), so on a scale of 1 to 500.000 it’s 12,40m. At the end of the string, is a day-pass ticket from Brussels (my second home).

Transcript of the accompanying sound installation: 

After you left, I never felt like home

So I don’t tell my friends when I’m about to leave,

Because that way they will still feel at home (when I’m gone)

I had to leave so many times

I can barely step in my shoes anymore

They’ve grown roots in Cádiz

In the crowded bus in Athens

In front of my aunt’s house

On the bench next to you here

I wonder what they left behind

while I was

moving ahead

moving somewhere else

in transit

constantly

home and not home

away and alone.