self storage

Self Storage

4 April – 7 May 1995
Acorn Storage Centre, Wembley

The media have been invited to follow Art Angel's Michael Morris (the producer of Self Storage) down what seems to be an endless series of corridors. What is behind the majority of the red doors remains a mystery.

In the immediate shadow of Wembley stadium stands the former Alcan Foil Factory. The building, now operated by Acorn Storage Centres, has been divided into 650 storage units - some the size of a closet, others as large as a ballroom.
From the outside, as you walk down long metal corridors, all those spaces look the same: a red metal door with a padlock, set in a grey sheet metal wall. Inside they are all different charged with a kind of intimacy because they contain things that seem to want to be hidden, protected. To look into one of these private spaces is to look into a corner of someone else's world. Samples of exotic woods; pizza boxes imported from Poland; boiler cleaning fluid; collections of pornography; complete train sets; garden furniture. They are all somewhere in storage.
Through this strange and furtively populated urban interior, visitors were taken on an intricate journey through whispering corridors of stored items, sounds and visions jointly conceived by Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson and a team of collaborators from the Royal College of Art. The RCA Acorn Research Cell was drawn from a wide range of disciplines across the college including photography, industrial and computer-related design, illustration, graphics, architecture, multi-media, painting and sculpture.

Self Storage, collecting ideas about our world to communicate to people who might live in a thousand years.
Time Out
You walk along a yellow line that runs down the long corridors lined with anonymous doors, and every so often a little arrow instructs you to pull a door open and see what you can see.…
The Independent