Disco Fallout Shelter (DFS)
Instant Coffee
May 6, 2009 – September 15, 2009
Instant Coffee, Disco Fallout Shelter (DFS), 10 hour video loop with powder coated metal, mirror, painted brick, and untended grass and weeds.
Artist Statement
Instant Coffee is a Toronto and Vancouver-based artist collective that builds public places to explore ideas, materials and actions outside of the isolated artist studio. Their architectural installations of social sculptures highlight the relationship between form and social interaction and are typically both inclusive and exclusionary.
This Disco Fallout Shelter (DFS) overtly extends the theme of exclusivity. It is a glitzed-up and powder coated re-articulation of the prolific and often makeshift mid-twentieth century fallout shelter. In the overgrown grass, a brightly coloured pathway leads to the shelter’s sparkling entrance where a low bass beat can be heard from the dance music being played inside. At the end of the path is a small viewing kiosk containing a video feed of Instant Coffee members playing records, eating spaghetti, dancing, reading, sleeping and just hanging out in the tight confines and under the protective barrier of the shelter. At play here is the tenuous relationship between this exclusive lifesaving hideaway, the nature of the collective as being selective, and the viewing kiosk where those who are outside can only observe and imagine what is really happening inside.
While Instant Coffee might “wish you were here”, fallout shelters by their nature are places limited to a small group of people. In the case of the DFS, it is only open to all the members of Instant Coffee. The fallout shelter, an icon of the cold war and the threat of nuclear war, was designed to save people by reducing exposure to radiation and radioactive debris. Governments, from first world USA to poverty-stricken Albania, built them for elite groups of high-ranking officials. Ironically, since fallout shelters were very expensive to build, most people would have been left out in the nuclear dust.
Instant Coffee Get Social and Get Saved
Instant Coffee’s most consistent members are Jinhan Ko, Khan Lee, Kelly Lycan, Jenifer Papararo, Cecilia Berkovic and Kate Monro.
