Voyage autour de ma chambre

Hans Schabus obtained the title of the work Voyage Autour De Ma Chambre from Xavier de Maistre’s correspondent novel. The French aristocrat wrote the story 1790 during a 42 day long duel inflicted confinement in his own house. Contrasting the then popular travel literature, which was filled with descriptions of adventurous trips around the world, he commenced on a journey around his room, travelling from one object to the other, from his bed to his chair and from there to his desk and so on, to later write about his experiences in a journal.

While de Maistre deconstructed the room he was imprisoned, Schabus dismantles an old caravan into three parts - floor, ceiling and wall. The act itself examines and disables the basic functions of the alleged mobile home: mobility and shelter. Like de Maistre Schabus questions the bourgeois habitat and playfully enables uncommon perspectives of the familiar.