Reflecting the impact of globalization and cultural fusion on personal circumstance, “Inside Out” deals with displacement, liminality and cultural identity in the lives of collaborating artists Klaus Knoll and Cella, neither refugees nor migrants or expatriats, rootless all the same. Like many of their projects, Inside Out shares an attention to the built environment, specifically to temporary architecture and ideas about the use of space.

Cella: These images diary a preoccupation with home. Creating a camera obscura out of places I have lived temporarily or imagined living is in a/my sense the embodiment of a place, a room (a sort of outer skin). The act of creating a camera obscura is a way of bringing that which is outside inside (a kind of internalizing which is not dissimilar to a plant digging its roots). The “live” rooms nurture a desire to belong where I am, a kind of non-material home and the photographs document these acts.

Klaus: We don’t have the same word: Cella’s “home” is not congruent with my “Heimat”. She is envious for something I lost long ago. We each form our own idea of the term, talking of roots and other subterranean intentions. Some experiences are still comparable, beyond all boundaries of culture and language: exile, being without a home, her early hunger for and my old hatred of normality. Home/Heimat is the focal point of this work, in fantasy as well as the one felt painfully missing. The play with projections speaks of deception, vision and the flowing boundaries between them. The melding of interior and outer world, the mutual permeation of normally separated spaces is not without a certain erotic component.

Process: In apartments, houses, hotel rooms and other places we have stayed in we blacken the rooms with…