How it came about

The invitation came from Nadia Schneider Willen who was part pf a group of swiss artists and curators based in Zurich. The space was called Kombirama. I had only a week to make a show. I arrived with idea, the show was called Double Take, but the idea did not last the flight over.

I just decided to make something happen during the show. The space which I think was formally a showroom or shop had a very distinctive green carpet that covered the whole floor.

I was staying in an apartment that was a short walk from the space. The walk was though streets of houses. One sound that hit me quite soon was the sound of vacum cleaning. I could it it like a chorus emanating from the houses as I passed by them.

In conversations with people in Zurich who said there used to be more people on the street that were homeless. The answer was to repatriate them back to whereever they lived in Switzerland.

I invited all the eight members of the group to bring their domestic hoovers in to the space, the show would last for one week. I used the contents of each vacum cleaner to make a ‘portrait’ of all of the groups. ( The majority of dust comes from human skin)There were about five male members of the group and I asked them on the night to make an unannouced and unexplained performance. Each taking their own hoover at a certain point during the opening and begin the hoover a designated part of the room. They would all eventually be cleaning their own section over and over. One by one they would turn off the machine stop cleaning and leave the machine where it was and continue to rejoin the rest of the crowd.