Instant Home

California, USA, and Berlin, Dresden, Germany, 1999 & ongoing

"As any homeless person of today knows, lurking about someone else's property offers immediate lessons on the difference between belonging to the group and being on the outside, personal freedom and public vagrancy, private rights and trespassing on private property. Yet as Berlin-based artist Valeska Peschke demonstrates with her transportable Instant Home, squatting and loitering may also be manipulated to merge private desires with public space. Without a permanent home of her own, Peschke has been traversing the U.S. and Europe in a pick-up truck, setting up "house" whenever and wherever the urge seizes her. Rather than put up a tent, however, Peschke inflates a 150 square-foot vinyl parody of the conventional, landlocked suburban dream with all its amenities. Ready to use in two minutes, her Instant Home contains all the comforts of a middle-class bungalow: a sofa, lamp, coffee table, fireplace, and television - all of which are blown up, literally, into soft, squishy caricatures of their former selves. And while overstuffed furniture has typically been a signifier of adult, middle-class taste, here the stereotype is exaggerated to a childlike extreme. That the home resembles a child's playhouse is perhaps why Peschke has been allowed to linger longer in the otherwise off-limit spaces where she has dropped anchor, from the driveways of suburban residences to the parking lots of downtown office districts. Her house is a nonaggressive, fun place to "hang out", a valued activity in western cultures where frenetic mobility is tempered by an emphasis on leisure time. Even so, public ordinances do not necessarily keep pace with changes in contemporary lifestyle, which is where Peschke's project upsets the delicate balance between infinite freedom of movement and social decline, hanging out and dropping out. In this respect, her project shares affinities with that of activists in Berlin who squatted empty buildings throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s in protest of the city's lack of adequate housing. Likewise, Peschke approached the idea of deomestic space from the perpective of intervention to open up some very fundamental socioeconomic and architectural issues. What constitutes a house? What form should it take? And, most importantly, why should it be "private"? "

x-treme houses, Courtnay Smith & Sean Topham, Prestel 2002