Shelter + Place

Shelter and Place is an interactive experience that mixes location mapping, spatial audio and dream-like vignettes into an open source exploration of our private environments.

The Covid-19 global pandemic saw many of us being isolated in this way to our domestic spaces, where our refuge has become a prison.

Yet our experiences of isolation have not been equal. Domestic environments are not equal. The virus may infect indiscriminately, but it’s ability to do so has followed the well worn architectures of discrimination. Economic, social, age, race, geography, gender; all these factors and more have been exposed as causative agents in how the illness has spread. Through this we have found ourselves asking what exactly we value, who exactly we are, and how exactly does the society we have built around ourselves protects us all.

Digital media has kept us connected but through a form of false intimacy. The urge to be together has been overwhelming for some, too much for others. We have had the scope of our universes reduced to the size of a house, a garden, an apartment, a room. The loss of these freedoms here has been mutual, but the scale of those losses has not.

In this period of global vulnerability priorities have shifted where more meaningful exchanges of ideas and experience are now as vital as ever. By creating a dialogue between each other using freely available technologies, we can come to know one another, to be with one another, to stand in each other’s worlds.

From these places a beautifully political act can happen; to share shelter with strangers so that we can know them in ways we never have, where unseen stories become seen and we discover a sense of place together in a world that asks us to be divided.