The object in this video has been constructed in the open Voxel world of Minetest, a virtual space inspired by the game architecture of famous Minecraft. Equipped with a pick, the Player’s goal is to dig for various basic ressources, to craft material and more tools, eventually building a whole world out of all of them.
For this project, I replaced the pick with my camera and thus went digging for visual ressources in the physical world offline collecting various textures from my Montreal neighbourhood. Once applied on the blocks of the virtual in-game world, I subsequently was enabled to build an environment that is familiar to what I see every day around my house and studio. This happened in April/May, when the lockdown was still on and the nexus between proximity and remoteness had shifted into the immaterial of the cyberspace while everybody was bound to their local area.
The texture found and used has shaped a dystopian avatar of post-industrial residential Montreal in the form of a patrimonial home, sold recently and most likely to be torn down soon. As a patchwork piece that went through numerous eras and decades of radical change and cheap modernisation, the building advertises its own disappearance as billboarded on the rooftop: a new condo project for a more connected, better living (website can be visited). The drone like camera movement, imitated by my digital body on Minetest, refers to the esthetics of marketing strategies in real estate business, to explore angles and perspectives and make the whole structure look sexy for sale.
The title sounds similar to a house sale ad, but is actually based on the name of an urban camp that has emerged in the East of Montreal this summer (un chez soi pour tous), as well as on the answer given by its inhabitants when asked what their utopian post-covid city would look like : One house for all.
