ELLE GALLEN
made some things like these:
Mandation
the house next door
Untitled (postponed)
rules
3d
collage
photography
what you, my dear viewer, should know
resume and contact
There’s someone living with my birds in the house next door. I went inside once. Kendrick led me, he was faster than me and was inside the property before I knew what was happening, through a green construction wall opened with a board haphazardly laid onto it. Tree branches covered it. The wall had a construction safety board: “Wear a mask”. And a hand sanitizer station. I didn’t use either. The front and side yard were vast in their trash, piles and piles of shit. Old spray paint, old beers and stuff. When were those people there? The basement/ground floor was open. Crisscrossing poles and support beams and my lungs filled with dust. Feet on solid construction and trash ground. My feet sunk through. Nothing of the inside felt like mine. None of it was. We jumped through a hole in the floor to the next floor. Still not ours. Our bottom unit would parallel this. I don’t know, it was amazing. Staircase in the same place as ours and a hole in the ground for plumbing. If our house was no such home. If we let it go. Or if it was never made for us. Dust encircled our bodies and entered our lungs and came out as spit. I still feel the particles in the phlegm in the back of my throat, pushing its way out and pushing hard. Does it want to return to where it came from or did I catch a tumor, a seedling, making its big escape from the house through me. What of that place do I carry with me here? Do I have inside me? Do I have a parallel, part of me that’s still there? The floor that’s like our bottom floor-where Frieda’s room and our bathroom live-was simple. Barren comparatively to the bottom. The staircase had no casing and the walls had the most beautiful lines of wood that were all different stains and it was so lovely. Who laid those pieces and why and where are they and what happened to it? Straight lines formed the body of the staircase and enclosed a curved wooden piece that formed the curve on the top of it. The wood circled and crossed over itself. Pieces placed with intent and they know they are there for each other and support the house and its structure and its inhabitants. Bird feathers. A few but not that many. My jaw and throat hurt and I think the birds poisoned me. I think they had a good reason to. Who was I to try and form a relationship? They don’t know of me. They still don’t, really. The birds weren’t there. I felt so fucking dreadful when we reached the stairs to go to the top floor. My floor. My birds’ floor. Except neither is mine and I know this is now if I didn’t know it before. The staircase was fucking riddled with bird feathers, laid like snowfall, held up by the spiderwebs and webs of dust and also more bird feathers. It was evidence. I’d step foot at the front door of their lair. Cave. Home. No part of me felt like I was welcomed or should be there. Though they are my goodmorning and my cellmates and my life partners, we are this way because I live in this house in my room with the cracks and they live in theirs with the splintered wood and skinned staircase. I am not welcome there and they are not welcome here. Kendrick convinced me to go up, I was entirely unprepared to face the birds in their home. Or to see their home when they’re away. Have they been in mine when I’m away? Gawked at my possessions and wall coverings and plastered staircases and felt ownership? I’d’ve prepared a note to have left them. Kendrick went first and I think I feel grateful for his want for adventure here. “No birds”. The person under the tarp was always a possibility, but not one I’d considered really. But he was there and moved when we woke him up with our flashlight and open mouths and talk of his birds. We ran. I didn’t believe him that someone was there, he’d already tried to scare me, you see? But he real and Kendrick grabbed my arm and led me all the way down and out and through the floor hole and to the front entrance. I didn’t believe him. I didn’t at all. What a perfect prank to pull! But it wasn’t. I called him evil as he led me back to the safety and confines of our home. Why so quick of me to disbelieve? Did I feel that the floor was mine and the birds alone? It isn’t. It belongs more to the person we’d walked in on in their dusty sanctuary. Who shares a room with my birds. They’re our birds, or not either of our birds and they’re literally just birds. What the hell does he think of them and how does he share a room with them and does he feed them? Oh my god. Whose room and whose house and whose land is it and do I even have a role in the space. Oh my god. It’s a mirror image to my place and it is 10 feet away from me, 4 feet if I lean against the wall. Our wall. Mine and the birds and the squatter’s and the dust’s. My throat is dry.
The film the house next door is a story about my feelings towards the house next to mine and how I deal with it from within the confines and safety of my own place. The fear I felt in the house next door largely surrounded the lack of confirmed safety the space lent to me due to the lack of jurisdiction it has. It’s illegal to be in it, so therefore everything is legal there. Anything really could’ve happened to me. But other than the physical fear of injury, I was scared of how the space reflected back onto me and how it compared to my house. They have the exact same layout and share a wall and roof, its physical similarities tying them together, but have entirely different worlds inside. My house is extremely typical; it has four bedrooms and two bathrooms with working plumbing and heating and a kitchen with the necessary (base level) appliances and a couch. I have four roommates and we go to school and go to work then come home and we cook together. We have a lease and pay rent every month and it works. The house is extremely functional. The house next door has no interior walls so therefore no bedrooms and no bathrooms and no plumbing or heating. It has no kitchen or couch or rent to pay and therefore no work necessary to pay to be there. It has no ties to the economic system and it scares me because it shows me how tied up in it all I am. It makes me think of my home as an apparatus, the apparatus being “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings” (Agamben, 14). Think of my home as a hidden limb of capitalism, as Gilles Deleuze did in Postscript on the Societies of Control: “the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker's familial house, the school),” (Deleuze, 6). And that William H Whyte theorized in The Organization Man, saying, “Unless one believes poverty ennobling, it is difficult to see the three-button suit as more of a strait jacket than overalls, or the ranch-type house than old law tenements.” (Whyte, 15), By undoing and unjustifying my home politically and economically, it undoes and unjustifies my being there, reminding me of the earth it's on and the Lenape people here before it and the black community here before me. Of the displacement of these people that took place for my being here. Moreover, the home next door has new residents, Morning Dove birds and a squatter, both of groups that have been disregarded by the state. It gives them a place to thrive in and return to, outside of the state’s regulations, though one that is toxic to breathe.
None of this is said in the film. Not much is either, except for everyday chatter about sharing brownies and video games, which are mundane yet still oppressive. The film is the story of me and the house next door through projections of the house next door onto mine. It’s the story of my processing of my place in my home, of my place and complicity in the system. The processing results in my eventual breakdown (through cleaning) and then giving in to the intense emotions it gives. Its six chapters, each consisting of my interactions with different areas of my home, dictate this breakdown and my actions within each space. In making it, I was inspired by the artwork of Gregor Schneider (in his architectural, environmental works evoking history and doubling within the home), Mierle Laderman Ukeles (in her mundane performances on the importance of the maintenance work), and Heider Bucher (in her “skinnings” of spaces that hold and transport transparent histories). Adding on to the aforementioned texts, I was inspired by Anthony Vidler’s The Architecture of the Uncanny: The Unhomely Houses of the Romantic Sublime, Rem Koolhaas’s Junkspace, and David Graeber’s Dead zones of the Imagination. The house next door evokes economic and political theory, artistic influence, to work as an inquiry into my place as a cog in the capitalist machine through the lens of my home.
Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus?, 2009.
Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control, 1992.
William H. Whyte, The Organization Man, 1956.
Gregor Schneider, Die Familie Schneider, 14 and 16 Walden Street, London. (01 October 2004 - 23 December 2004).
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside (July 23, 1973).
Heidi Bucher, Bellevue (kleines Glasportal), (1988).