Project Description

The Trailer, a project by The Bridge Club collaborative, is an installation and mobile series of live, temporal performance works centered around and inside of a vintage camping trailer. Following an inaugural performance at Lawndale Art Center in March 2013, The Trailer will premiere with a Texas tour in October and will tour the U.S. and beyond over a period of several years.

The interior of the trailer has been transformed to more closely resemble a Victorian domestic space than a utilitarian camp. Examples of its alterations include the installation of an ornate tufted headboard, wallpaper, hardwood floors, crown molding and a crystal chandelier. This ornate interior conflicts with the notion of mobility, intentionally grounding the performance actions in a more stationary locale and alluding to simultaneous desires for adventure, discovery, comfort and home.

Audiences will be invited to explore the trailer installation and interact with its objects while the four costumed members of The Bridge Club are engaged in a variety of performance activities in and around the trailer. Performance actions will relate to remembering past or planning future experiences, seeming not to acknowledge their current locale. In this way, the live action of the performances will conflate lived and collected experience, and invoke the role of memory in authenticity.

Outside of the trailer and via this website, visitors will be invited to share personal stories about objects that hold importance to them. The archive will include handwritten text, sound recordings, hand drawn maps and postcards in addition to narratives collected online. Contributed objects and stories will be incorporated into the installation and future performance actions, and contributors are encouraged to follow online documentation of the project to see how their own contributions might emerge as the project evolves.

This project will embody a search for what is distinct in our increasingly homogenous culture, while addressing our simultaneous and conflicting desires for adventure and security, experience and memory. The souvenirs and archive collected at each site refer to a desire to possess or preserve an experience of a place, while their assimilation into the trailer refers to our desire to make ‘home’ portable, no matter how impractical or ideological.

The Trailer will tour to rural and urban areas, both in the context of traditional art venues and in locales that typically see no contemporary art. In selecting sites for tour performances, we will aim for a diverse cross-section of the American population’s ‘ideal’ locations for pastime activities. This will include county fairs, campgrounds, sporting events and small town squares in addition to venues for contemporary art. This project aims to create a dialogue that is regionally specific and addresses broader issues of identity, home and displacement in the 21st century American landscape.