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About the Project
A Mobile Home is a temporary public artwork by creative collective Xenoduo resembling an emergency shelter tent that serves as both a sculpture and an immersive performance stage. The piece draws attention to the complex U.S. immigration process, offering a literal and metaphorical entry point into the current migrant crisis.
On view in Sunset Park through November 2nd, 2024, the multi-functional structure highlights the challenges faced by asylum seekers, especially those pursuing Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in the United States. Sited in Sunset Park, one of New York’s most diverse neighborhoods, Xenoduo will also collaborate with refugee-focused organizations in New York City to host public workshops on the TPS process. The piece also serves as a performance platform, where Miguel and Xinan, in a Neo-futurist-inspired theater experience, navigate in short spoken and movement-based vignettes. Each vignette reflects the artists’ personal immigration journeys, their struggles to remain in the U.S., and the doubts they face as immigrants.
Xenoduo’s project A Mobile Home was selected as More Art’s 2024 Engaging Artists Commission.
About the Artists
Xenoduo is a creative collective between visual artist Xinan Ran (b.1994, Inner Mongolia, China) and Miguel Alejandro Castillo (b.1993, Caracas, Venezuela). Since 2017, the duo has been collaborating on installation and performance projects exploring diasporic imagination, future folklore, and the nuanced art of cross-cultural and transatlantic homemaking.
Xinan Ran received her MFA from Hunter College (2022), and BFA from Pratt Institute (2017). Ranked “Highbrow and Brilliant” by the New York Magazine Matrix, Xinan is a New York State Council on the Arts grant recipient, was a mentee in New York Foundation for the Arts’s Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program (2023), a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Arts Center resident (2022), and an Ox-Bow Summer Fellow (2016). Apart from her studio practice, Xinan is an art educator, an art administrator and an aspirational set designer for new theaters.
Miguel Castillo Alejandro holds a bachelor’s in dance and theater from Middlebury College and an M.F.A in Choreography and Performance from Smith College. Miguel is one of the “25 performers to watch out for in 2024” by Dance Magazine. Miguel has performed in the U.S and internationally in the works of Faye Driscoll, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Jeanine Durning, Maria Hassabi, Tzveta Kassabova, Laurel Jenkins, Delfos Danza Contemporánea, among others. Castillo is a danceWEB scholar at the Impulstanz Festival in Vienna in 2021, a New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks Artist in 2022-2023, and an Abrons Arts Center artist in residence for 2024-2025.