18 min. English.
We are sealed in steel in soil in tight. Essentials of subterranean safe houses: steel bunk beds, anticipatory mattresses, efficient long-wear gray low pile carpet, storage everywhere. Surveillance cameras transmitting multiple views to your screens. Solar-powered long-lasting battery, water purification and heating systems, air filtration, two kitchens with fridge stove microwave, three bathrooms, garden plots prepared with soil and sun lamps, a gun range. Special filters to suck out the smoke after each shot.
It could be a gallery, a museum, a biotech company, the set from Kubrick’s 2001, white and pure and clean. I try to imagine it furnished but cannot. Perhaps the owners will hire an interior designer specializing in windowless spaces. I envision bright cheery colors chosen to keep away memories of outdoors and the gloom of sunken living. Save yourself and your immediate family.
Doublewide is a portrait of a Texas-based company that sells, constructs, and installs custom-made, secure steel subterranean hideouts for wealthy clients. A trip to one of their newly completed bunkers in Michigan reveals a fortified underground world for the wealthy to retreat from global crises.
Jenny Perlin, born in 1970 in Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA, is an artist working in Brooklyn. Her practice in 16mm film, video, and drawing works with and against the documentary tradition, incorporating innovative stylistic techniques to emphasize issues of truth, misunderstanding, and personal history. Her projects look closely at ways in which social machinations are reflected in the smallest fragments of daily life. Perlin’s works have been shown in numerous exhibitions and film festivals worldwide. In 2015, two of her 16mm films were included in Forum Expanded.
