In development

House of Us – Part 2 : The Son will be mainly an audiovisual installation about the feelings of isolation and depression which face young people growing up into an anxiety-ridden world of post-covid, climate-change, war-torn, AI disaster scenarios. Where can they find the resources for inner strength and mental health? Is art one of the only ways out?

This space is inspired by an encounter I had with a young boy in Kyoto. He was a hikikomori. This is a Japanese syndrome (which has now spread world-wide) where young people, especially boys, lock themselves up in their bedrooms in the family home and refuse to come out, sometimes for years. This boy hadn’t left home since the age of twelve or thirteen and was now nearly eighteen. He was a virtuoso artist and draftsman, composed extraordinary piano concertos, and danced for hours in front of his mirror with a red ping pong bat and an invisible ball. Creativity was his saving grace. Most hikikomoris disappear into a universe of computers, video games and virtual reality.

I imagined a link here with the other House of Us protagonists: Konstantin, the tortured young writer son in The Seagull, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who holds a symbolic place in the project. The characters of Hamlet and Ophelia both speak to today’s lost youth; they are contemporary archetypes, incarnating all the fears and insecurities of their generation. In House of Us- Part 2: The Son, we will enter a dark and disturbing world of images, music, video screens and artwork, devised and curated in collaboration with Tomo, the young hikikomori from Kyoto.