The Center for Ethnography, Department of Anthropology, School of Social Sciences and Claire Trevor School of the Arts present

214 sq ft : an installation

Available for viewing April 9-16, 2012
Social Science Plaza B, UC Irvine

214 sq ft is an immersive installation created for Project Hope Alliance, a non-profit organization that serves the Orange County homeless population through the Project Hope School and Family Stability Program. It was intended as a reflection on the experience of homelessness among the working poor, many of whom take shelter in low-budget motels across Orange County. For such families, a motel room is an impermanent home, made homelike through the personal objects that fill it and the quotidian activities of home-life within its walls.

The project stages a motel room in different public spaces. The installation, roughly 214 square feet, includes the furniture typical of motels as well as found objects representing the personal belongings of a composite family. Images and personal narratives of motel-life, as derived from footage from the Alexandra Pelosi documentary "Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County," are embedded in the space through multi-media. Audio and video recordings emanate discretely from objects (lamps, paintings), and portions of narratives are printed on bedding, inscribed in the wallpaper, and etched on the furniture.

As part of the Center for Ethnography Rethinking Design Series, the installation is a prototype for interrogating intersections between ethnographic inquiry and aesthetic processes and an experiment in the use of design to inform ethnography. 214 sq ft is sited at UCI to instigate discussion among students and faculty across the disciplines about modalities of representation and inquiry and the meanings of transience, home, and inequality.

Created by:
Christine Hegel-Cantarella, Assistant Research Specialist, UCI Department of Anthropology and Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion
Luke Hegel-Cantarella, Assistant Professor, Department of Drama, Claire Trevor School of the Arts

Documentary footage courtesy of Alexandra Pelosi
Properties design by Tiffany Anguiano
Sound installation by Jeff Polunas

Created in association with the Project Hope Alliance with special support from the Friend Family

For further information, visit http://www.socsci.uci.edu/files/ethnography/news_events/2012/p1030239.jpg or contact Sandy Cushman, scushman@uci.edu or 949-824-3344.