For exhibition ‘A walk elsewhere’, Pier 2 Artcenter, Taiwan, October 15 - November 24, video and audio, 2015
A house does not tell us its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand; written in the corners of the rooms, the gratings of the windows, the traces on the switches, the hanging towels, the position of the television, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
(According to Italo Calvino’s Invisible cities)
'Between 23:08 and 10:39' is a part from a project where artist Elien Ronse sleeps in a different place each night for a set period of time. She finds places to stay through word of mouth. She establishes her own method of research by taking pictures, making videos and notes, aiming to be completely objective.
Ronse’s project explores the relationship between people’s behaviour and the way their house is organised. The act of brushing teeth together, sleeping in someone’s private room and seeing them first thing in the morning reveals information about her hosts that she would not have access to in a public space.
During the project Ronse methodically collects household objects, applying both rigorous and arbitrary rules to organise and display her archive. Generating the archive is a way for her to cross the threshold that separates intimate spaces from public ones. This is done to question assumptions about the way the domestic environment is used and understood.
During her stay in Vienna, Berlin, Belgium and Taiwan Ronse focuses on domestic spaces. Ronse’s impossible wish is to get an overview of how people organise their ‘stuff’, and finds herself constantly comparing and looking for specifics that distinguish people from a specific place from people elsewhere in the world.
A house holds the most personal and intimate aspects of a person’s life, while at the same time is filled with commonly available and impersonal things, quotidian yet essential items that are mass-produced. For example living spaces are structured simultaneously in a general and personal way - many people have a table with 4 chairs but not everyone has a red lamp that flashes when the washing machine has finished a load of laundry.
