Video Out

At Home... in a State

Black and white film/video hybrid, no sound. Loop, installation. Two friends ponder security issues, the threat of gendered violence and the presence of the state in their personal lives. Filmed at the Frances Street squats, East Vancouver, where I lived while studying film making at Emily Carr College of Art. This housing resistance was a many-months-long occupation of a row of abandoned houses slated for demolition and luxury development.

Shortly after this work was made, the houses were surrounded by a SWAT police tactic, the squatters evacuated and the community dispersed. The video became part of a multi-channel installation called Thalamus: The Women's Apartments, at Ace Art Gallery, Winnipeg. Its themes of DIY culture and the rejection of societal norms embody the punk ethos, and the violence of precarity and surveillance continues to accelerate to ever greater levels of urgency.