Artiflux
Anais Freitas
When a human being is displaced, he or she will anchor him or herself to the fixed, the tangible and the recognizable in order to make sense out of a reality that is constantly in flux. Thus, when reflecting upon the experience of migrating, compelling storytelling has one thing in common: the association to specificity in the form of the fixed—objects, brands, places, things, or one's idea of things that always stays the same no matter how much the narrator changes. Amidst the information overload and chaos we live in nowadays, the fixed help us navigate our experience. We hold on to what we know. Ikea is the epitome of the fixed. The brand grants its customers with the most precious quality of them all: familiarity. In a way, simple design and affordable pricing gives us emotional stability through a piece of generic furniture—a fixed container that we can later fill in with our unique stories. ARTIFLUX is a bilingual, sound-based installation that, through the appropriation of the Ikea brand and its visual language, gathers a collection of interviews to confirm to the viewer/listener how reality is a version of the juxtaposition between our stories and the artifacts that help us narrate them.