INNER-OUTER

Inner–Outer explores the basement as both architectural and psychic space—the body’s interior made visible through the lens of surveillance. A CCTV camera monitors a stairwell in a domestic basement, capturing a motorized rope that moves rhythmically up and down, forming and unforming knots in an autonomous, almost biological gesture. This footage is then projected onto a wall outside the stairwell, creating a feedback loop between interior observation and exterior display.

The basement functions as the unconscious of the home: a zone of storage, burial, and support—the hidden infrastructure that sustains visible life above. The stairs become a vertebral column, a passageway between layers of consciousness, between what is kept below and what is allowed to surface. By turning the gaze inward, the work inverts the logic of the security camera: instead of guarding against external threats, it surveils the internal, the foundational, the repressed.

The physicality of the rope—its tension, contraction, and release—evokes the dynamics of recording and unrecording, of memory forming and erasing itself. Its cyclical knotting gestures recall the Andean quipu: an ancestral system of knotted cords used to register knowledge, time, and community relations. Here, the rope functions as a living archive—an inscription of invisible forces and bodily rhythms. Each knot marks a moment of accumulation and release, a brief crystallization of memory and meaning before dissolving again.

Sound captured by microphones placed within the stairwell grounds the work in material presence—the building’s breath, its ambient hum, the acoustic signature of enclosure. Yet this sonic intimacy is abstracted by the projection outside the room, generating an uncanny doubling. We observe a space that observes itself, an interior made exterior, the architecture of the body turned inside out.

Inner–Outer stages an act of introspection that is also exposure, asking where the boundary lies between self-knowledge and self-surveillance, between the spaces we inhabit and the bodies that contain us.