Hillerbrand+Magsamen Virtual Home Tour

During the Covid19 pandemic we have experienced our home, family, community and politics in new ways rife with fear but also new ways of seeing and being together. From face masks to quarantine to zoom calls, our methods for connecting are forever changed. In this video we take large sheets of recycled plastic to physicalize our air, breath, objects and space as we move and interact through our home.

Hands of family of four gather together plates that are shattered and reconstructed while an unseen force shakes the table, making it a futile process.

DIY Love Seat, is a playful, experimental short video that reinterprets family and its identity. In this dark comedy, a woman takes the family couch and cuts out a section with a chainsaw. Her husband, in a very deadpan manner, uses duct tape to repair the couch. This physical act brings them literally closer together, but perhaps not emotionally.

Embarking on an epic adventure, the collaborative artistic team of Hillerbrand-Magsamen creates new levels of interaction, communication and exploration by breaking and cutting holes into their actual home to make a habitrail-like environment where they go nowhere fast while dramatic music propels their action.

Short for “estimated time of arrival”, ETA reveals a couple’s tension through the enclosed space of a car as rain and thunder dramatically pour down with an impending doom. The end reveals a constructed reality in a suburban environment that plays on ideas of film, theater and reality within a relationship.

What appears to be a typical family dinner becomes surreal as a cloud of fog engulfs and distorts the everyday event and fluctuates between memory, reality and dream worlds through the metaphor of fog and home.