The Housetrike

Bas Sprakel (photo)

Conceptual artist and explorer

Art, Investigation and Spielerei.

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A few words about the how and why of it all... 

 

The development of this simple, multifunctional, clever and cheap device took all in all seven years. Earlier solutions for homeless people like honeycomb-shelters,  community farms and self built housing projects were nice ideas but they all had some practical problems. The main problem was that most ideas still derived from the dogma that one should live in a house.  And in order to accomplish that the homeless person became inevitably dependent on the one who could lead him to that holy goal.

In my opinion most problems are best solved when becoming totally responsible and thus being the solution to one's own problems... from the start preferably. Help can therefore only be effective if it helps the homeless to help themselves. So I started looking more in that direction and it led me gradually to the idea of this multifunctional bikecamper. The further development of the idea into the first prototype took me an other year of trial and error.  

 

Motivation

Life of most homeless people is though, unhealthy and many times painfully humiliating. And all of that is of course totally unnecessary. In in our western society we must be capable to provide a real and strong support for all people in need. But for the homeless all aid stays at a minimum level and a lot of the help relies on the good deeds of volunteers. This support is great of course but emphasizes at the same time the feeling of dependency. It is therefore in my eyes, as beautiful as it sometimes seems to be, most of the times counter productive. 

The idea of the Housetrike wants to bypass that endless road of dependency by simply helping the homeless to help themselves. They'll stay in full control of their own life and homelessness becomes nothing more than a situation one has to go through. All additional problems caused by the situation of being homeless like shame, addictions, self loathing, being poor, treating yourself bad etc., can be avoided a great deal using this multi functional self help device.  

 

Theme 

 

The same interesting mechanics of dependency can be observed everywhere. This creative and destructive phenomenon and it is a big theme in my work, both as an object and being totally subject to that same force myself outside and within my work.

The Housetrike is in the evolution of my work and studying the whole process of dependency and freedom probably the next logical step. This time it is not so much an  opinion or expression but an elegant solution for a problem anyone can hit at any time.