Hidden Living
2010 – 2011
Photographs taken in various campsites all around Belgium, evoking the tension that exists between living together and turning in on oneself.
Life on a camping site can be ambiguous.
When the idea of a united, multicultural and solidarity showing Europe is confronted to economic or identity protectionism, Katherine Longly shows us a wrongly peaceful model.
Spaces are at the same time shared and protected, vacationers seem to hesitate between living together and turning in on themselves.
Campers are highly imaginative when looking for means to visually hide from their neighbors : choosing the place with the highest hedges, building zigzags with folding screens, putting up fences, etc. "Hidden Living" can be a camper's adage.
But all those efforts they make to create a private and intimate space are immediately wiped out, when we think about the sounds that the campers have to face that surround them. What's the point in hiding from your neighbors when you can hear them cough, talk or even snore ?
This ambiguousness made Katherine Longly smile, when she stayed for a couple of days on a camping site near the North Sea. She felt affection for the campers. So she decided to cover their vacation destinations, from the coast to the Ardennes passing by Brabant, to record the thousand different ways to recreate one's own cocoon in a small-scale model.
Her concrete and suggestive reading tells what really is and what is underlying.
This approach only reflects one single part of the whole reality, the one Katherine decided to isolate and watch. Life on a camping site is also user-friendly ; it happens of course that campers share aperitifs and greet their neighbors over the fences. The camper's territory, as limited as it seems, stays permeable.
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