Opening & Performance: Xenoduo's A Mobile Home

Join us on Saturday, September 14th from 1-3pm (performance at 2pm) at Sunset Park for the opening of A Mobile Home by Xenoduo, our 2024 Engaging Artists Commission.

A Mobile Home is a temporary public artwork by creative collective Xenoduo resembling an emergency shelter tent that serves as both a sculpture and an immersive performance stage. The piece draws attention to the complex U.S. immigration process, offering a literal and metaphorical entry point into the current migrant crisis. 

On view through November 2nd, the multi-functional structure highlights the challenges faced by asylum seekers, especially those pursuing Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in the United States. Sited in Sunset Park, one of New York’s most diverse neighborhoods, Xenoduo will also collaborate with refugee-focused organizations in New York City to host public workshops on the TPS process. The piece also serves as a performance platform, where Miguel and Xinan, in a Neo-futurist-inspired theater experience, navigate in short spoken and movement-based vignettes. Each vignette reflects the artists’ personal immigration journeys, their struggles to remain in the U.S., and the doubts they face as immigrants.

For the opening reception, Xenoduo has curated an hour-long performance (starting at 2pm) featuring music by Daniella Barbarito and other artists reflecting on their immigration and home-making journeys.

Learn more about A Mobile Home on our website. Follow More Art on social media @moreartnyc and subscribe to our newsletter for updates on upcoming events & activations! 

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About the Artists

Xenoduo is a creative collective between visual artist Xinan Ran (b.1994, Inner Mongolia, China) and Miguel Alejandro Castillo (b.1993, Caracas, Venezuela). Since 2017, the duo has been collaborating on installation and performance projects exploring diasporic imagination, future folklore, and the nuanced art of cross-cultural and transatlantic homemaking.

Xinan Ran received her MFA from Hunter College (2022), and BFA from Pratt Institute (2017). Ranked “Highbrow and Brilliant” by the New York Magazine Matrix, Xinan is a New York State Council on the Arts grant recipient, was a mentee in New York Foundation for the Arts’s Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program (2023), a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Arts Center resident (2022), and an Ox-Bow Summer Fellow (2016). Apart from her studio practice, Xinan is an art educator, an art administrator and an aspirational set designer for new theaters.

Learn more about Xinan’s practice at xinanran.work and follow along at @hdogthefurtrader.

Miguel Alejandro holds a bachelor’s in dance and theater from Middlebury College and an M.F.A in Choreography and Performance from Smith College. Miguel is one of the “25 performers to watch out for in 2024” by Dance Magazine. Miguel has performed in the U.S and internationally in the works of Faye Driscoll, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Jeanine Durning, Maria Hassabi, Tzveta Kassabova, Laurel Jenkins, Delfos Danza Contemporánea, among others. Castillo is a danceWEB scholar at the Impulstanz Festival in Vienna in 2021, a New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks Artist in 2022-2023, and an Abrons Arts Center artist in residence for 2024-2025.

Learn more about Miguel’s practice at miguelalejandro.art and follow along at @love.entirely.

Daniella Barbarito is multi-disciplinary artist who was born and raised in Caracas and currently lives in Madrid. Her music reimagines Venezuelan tradition with a modern approach and deals with memory and identity with a humor, pathos and nostalgia that borrows from the bolero cannon. She accompanies herself on the Venezuelan cuatro, adding a touch of folklore to her post-modern approach.

Learn more about Daniela’s work and follow along at @daniellabarbarito.

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About More Art

More Art is a NYC-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that collaborates with artists across their careers to catalyze social change by producing meaningful participatory public art for a broad audience. Through creative engagement, More Art empowers all people to utilize art to connect with others, build awareness, and drive action on topics that affect our lives and communities. Since its inception in 2004, More Art has produced a wide range of projects reflecting the concerns and challenges of various New York City communities. More Art focused on building collaborations between our neighbors by creating opportunities for a creative community education and public art projects. Consequently, our projects have gone increasingly ambitious, transcending the traditional boundaries of public art and expanding into workshops, lectures and panel discussions. Learn more about our work and explore our 20-year archive of public art at moreart.org. 

A Mobile Home was selected through an open call as More Art’s 2024 Engaging Artist Commission. More Art’s Engaging Artists Commission is an annual opportunity for early career artists focused on the incubation and commissioning of a public art project and carries an $8000 award to realize the project, plus curatorial, conceptual, budgetary, and logistical mentorship. The Commission is part of More Art’s Engaging Artists program which provides infrastructure and laboratory for artists to gain a deeper understanding of the history and vitality of public and socially engaged art.

This project is supported in part by the Lambent Foundation, the Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. More Art thanks our partner, NYC Parks.