This was a project in which Nao Bustamante and I spent a week living together – well not exactly. As far as everyone was concerned we were living in a flat doing a project for which we had bought two outfits; daywear and nightwear. The concept was that only one of us could go out at a time without the inconvenience of leaving the flat wearing bed clothes. In the flat we had a living together hotline which people could ring to find out where the outfit would be on any given day. In actuality, we had bought more than one outfit and spent a week doing what we wanted, covering our tracks and getting involved in a heady matrix of lies. The duplicity of the project eventually caused us to experience confusion, paranoia and vertigo – not unlike emotions suggested in Hitchcock’s San Francisco based film Vertigo
A negotiation of inconvenience?
Nao and I had wanted to work together for a while, but the timing of the project was inconvenient for both of us. Compromise and pragmatism led us to create Living Together as a smokescreen which, we imagined, would let us hang-out and do what we wanted.
