In June 2008 I became one of the last survivors of an unspecified global disaster. Seeking refuge in the remote countryside of Northern Portugal, I looked for the right place for a shelter and built it, documenting this process and the following attempts at survival with two webcams in a kind of loose diary format.

Treating this footage as raw material found by an unknown researcher years later, I edited the video work "BEYOND THE CITIES. Diary of an unknown survivor".

Building the shelter

I found an old goat corral and decided to build my shelter in that. The roof of the corral had once been made of flat rocks. At some point this roof had collapsed and the rocks were lying around on the ground, overgrown by weeds and partly covered in earth. For two days I cleared away thorny weeds, small trees and rubble. The rocks that had been the roof were carried outside the shelter to make a footpath, keeping the best and flattest rocks for later.

When I had finished with that I noticed that the ground of the shelter was very uneven. Equipped with a small shovel, I started to even out the ground, digging up more and more rocks and pulling out long, entangled plant roots. I then carried the good rocks back in and laid them on the now even ground, making a solid floor.

After the basic structure had been built from materials I had found in the vicinity and in the garage at the residency center, I started collecting suitable (and some non-suitable) objects for my endeavour.

There was the aluminium saucepan, there were found wooden planks and assorted herbs, which I dried under the tent. But there were also fake grass from the DIY center, a plastic device for drying clothes and a windchime, which I had picked up at a pound shop in the nearest town.

At first I filmed my clearing and building work documentary reality TV style. As time passed, however, I got more and more involved in this fictitious world I was creating and increasingly felt like a true survivor. My footage began to reflect this and became more and more fictitious as well.

The footage that one of the two webcams shot was very different from the other. It couldn't cope with the amount of light outside on a sunny day. The result were very interesting images and a dichotomy between more documentary footage and more experimental, poetic imagery. I decided to work with that as it really reflected the two sides of the project: the absurdity of my hapless attempts at everyday survival life, and the gravity of the realization of what would actually happen if this was real life.

At the end of the 3-week residency, the three participating artists showed their work in a public presentation. I showed the video "Beyond the Cities".

After the presentation of the video, the whole group went to have a look at the shelter, which was about a mile away from the center. I hadn't thought of the shelter as an installation and it hadn't been my idea to take the people there, so it was an amazing experience to see the reaction of the visitors to the space, which they all described as very powerful afterwards.