The paraSITE Project

By stephensurlin on September 30th, 2009, 8:14 pm 5 Comments

I have been hearing about this artist for the past few years and I’m very interested in his work (Check out his website). As the weather becomes more and more cold I begin to think of the homeless more. They may seem invisible though they are there. Many city’s are creating architecture that makes it more difficult for the homeless to find a place to rest, by creating divided benches and circular bus stop seats with more leveled laying area. I find this artist helped inspire my delving into the blurred disection between Activist and Artist.  

American artist Michael Rakowitz’s paraSITE project proposed to take advantage of the exterior ventilation systems on existing architecture to give the homeless a temporary shelter.

The deflated structure have handles to be easily transported or can be carried on one’s back. Once he has found the outtake ducts of a building’s HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning) system, the user attach the intake tube of the structure to the vent. The warm air leaving the building inflates and heats the membrane structure.

From February 1998 until April 1998, the artist distributed seven prototypes of the paraSITE shelter to several homeless people in Cambridge.

While these shelters were being used, they functioned also as a protest device against authorities willing to make their cities “homeless-proof”. They made even more visible the unacceptable circumstances of homeless life within the city.

I am planning to soon begin an innitiative with my Social Justice Group which works under the umbrella of OPIRG. I want to manage a collective of volunteers/artist to help me construct an extremely price and resource efficient sleeping bag that can be given away to homeless people at the shelters I partner with.

Category: blog | Tags: Activism Homeless Inflatable Shelter Michael Rakowitz paraSITE | Permalink: The paraSITE Project