migrant…asylum seeker…illegal immigrant…


The debate on migration rages on, becoming ever more fractious as the political landscape shifts towards the right. But who is an asylum seeker? Who is an economic migrant? Boundaries between the two are blurred, the definitions often hazy. We are constantly told that immigration is a threat to our identity, to our safety, but it is a subject which has no easy answers, no solutions. Migration is part of the human condition; when life becomes insupportable for us we move on. This is how we came out of Africa and continues to this day. The world which we occupy is unequal and those with the least often have the quietest voices. CAVE tries to give a coherent form to the abstract landscape of this inequality. Traditionally the cave was a symbol representing contradicting ideas; shelter and concealment, the reactionary and the enlightened. Here it serves as a symbol of the increasingly fragmented society in which we live, a society where a few own the majority of the wealth, and homelessness and displacement are part of life everywhere. Dreams are sold to the impoverished in the global south, dreams which are not reality. 

CAVE uses as its concept the Christian/Islamic story of The Seven Sleepers; allegorical tales where refuge is sought by the persecuted in a cave and time passes while the refugees sleep. In the story the cave is a refuge, but in the contemporary world that refuge can become a place which imprisons rather than shelters. From refugee camps to the urban homeless CAVE explores what it is to be shelterless.