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
Summer and Fall 2024. Multiple performance dates to be announced.
Where
Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Additional locations and details to be announced.
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About the artist
Xenoduo: Miguel Alejandro Castillo and Xinan Ran
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.
Header image: Rendering of proposed project A Mobile Home, Xinan Ran, Miguel Alejandro Castillo, 2023.
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. www.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. www.Miguelalejandro.art
Xenoduo's project A Mobile Home was selected as More Art's 2024 Engaging Artists Commission.