A Mobile Home
Engaging Artists
A Mobile Home
A Mobile Home is a mobile installation resembling an emergency shelter tent, serving as both a public sculpture and an immersive performance stage. It visualizes the complex immigration process and offers a literal and metaphorical entry point for the public to understand, and contribute to, addressing the urban migrant crisis.
When
On view September 14, 2024 – November 2, 2024
Where
Sunset Park, Brooklyn
Events & Activations
Saturday, September 14, 2024: For the opening reception, Xenoduo performed at the site of “A Mobile Home” in Sunset Park, exploring the meaning of home for recent migrants, with music by Daniella Barbarito.
Saturday, October 5, 2024, 3-5 pm: Xenoduo performed at Union Square as part of “Everyone Who Lives Here is a New Yorker,” an afternoon celebrating shared immigrant histories timed to coincide with the opening of Coco Fusco’s public artwork of the same name.
Saturdays in October, 1-3 pm: Xenoduo will facilitate workshops with local and community nonprofit organizations working to support migrants and refugees. Topics include: TPS Application filing, paths to citizenship, and work support.
Installation detail of A Mobile Home in Sunset Park, 2024
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About the artist
Installation view of A Mobile Home in Sunset Park, 2024
A Mobile Home is a mobile installation resembling an emergency shelter tent, serving as both a public sculpture and an immersive performance stage. It visualizes the complex immigration process and offers a literal and metaphorical entry point for the public to understand, and contribute to, addressing the urban migrant crisis.
The structure’s flexible, customizable design symbolizes the hurdles and phases of immigration bureaucracy, highlighting the adaptability that migrants employ to swiftly establish a “home” using unfamiliar or makeshift resources. The installation employs materials commonly used for temporary constructions and features enlarged images of security screening questions from Temporary Protected Status (TPS) applications, covering both the interior walls and the exterior soft cover. With “layers” of interpretation for the public, A Mobile Home mirrors the intricacies of homemaking in a foreign land.
An essential component of this project is its use as a performance platform—an elevated stage encircled by viewers. Activated by performances in the Summer and Fall of 2024, the Xenoduo will navigate between “rooms” via doorways, using narratives, music, and movement to reimagine immigration processes and insist on humanizing and welcoming alternatives.
Adaptable for various public settings, A Mobile Home plays on its name, juxtaposing the transient nature of displacement with migrants’ deep-rooted sense of “home”. It underscores their/our yearning to build homes, wherever or however brief the stay.
This project was selected as part of More Art’s 2024 Engaging Artists Commission.
Xenoduo
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. Learn more at xinanran.work
Miguel 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. Learn more at miguelalejandro.art
Xenoduo's project A Mobile Home was selected as More Art's 2024 Engaging Artists Commission.
Performance still, A Mobile Home, from the opening of "Everyone Who Lives Here Is A New Yorker", October 2024
Performance still, A Mobile Home, from the opening of "Everyone Who Lives Here Is A New Yorker", October 2024
Performance still, A Mobile Home, from the opening of "Everyone Who Lives Here Is A New Yorker", October 2024
Performance still, A Mobile Home, from the opening of "Everyone Who Lives Here Is A New Yorker", October 2024
Performance still, A Mobile Home, from the opening of "Everyone Who Lives Here Is A New Yorker", October 2024
Performance still, A Mobile Home in Sunset Park, Daniella Barbarito, September 2024
Performance still, A Mobile Home in Sunset Park, Miguel Alejandro Castillo, Xinan Ran, and Cristina Moya-Palacios, September 2024
Performance still, A Mobile Home in Sunset Park, September 2024
Performance still, A Mobile Home in Sunset Park, Miguel Alejandro Castillo and Saul, September 2024
Installation detail of A Mobile Home in Sunset Park, 2024
Performance still, A Mobile Home in Sunset Park, Daniella Barbarito and Miguel Alejandro Castillo, September 2024
Performance still, A Mobile Home in Sunset Park, Miguel Alejandro Castillo and Xinan Ran, September 2024
Performance still, A Mobile Home in Sunset Park, Miguel Alejandro Castillo and Cristina Moya-Palacios, September 2024
Installation detail of A Mobile Home in Sunset Park, 2024
Installation detail of A Mobile Home in Sunset Park, other meanings of "TPS," 2024
Performance still, A Mobile Home in Sunset Park, Cristina Moya-Palacios September 2024
Performance still, A Mobile Home in Sunset Park, Cristina Moya-Palacios and audience, September 2024
Related
Migration in Dialogue – Xenoduo
Xenoduo in IMPULSE Magazine by Mariado Martínez Pérez
Opening & Performance: Xenoduo’s A Mobile Home
More Art's 2024 Engaging Artists Commission, A Mobile Home by creative collective Xenoduo, opens Saturday, September 14th from 1-3pm at Sunset Park.
Xenoduo In Conversation
A conversation between Miguel Alejandro Castillo and Xinan Ran on creative collective Xenoduo, More Art's 2024 EA Commission Artists.
Engaging Artists Commission
More Art’s Engaging Artists Commission is an opportunity for early career artists focused on the incubation and commissioning of a public art project.