Liquid Home is an interactive installation that reimagines the concept of safe space as a semi-transparent membrane — not a closed boundary, but a selective barrier that protects while enabling interaction with the outer world. The work was created site-specifically for an abandoned military swimming pool at Kasárna Karlín, Prague, transforming the empty basin into a space of immersion without water.
The installation centers on a large-scale wireframe structure suspended above the pool floor, constructed entirely from white cotton thread. The form resembles two hands cupped upward, holding something fragile and vulnerable. Visitors descend into the empty pool and move through the enveloping structure, which functions as both shelter and threshold — a membrane made of negative space, allowing the audience to observe the world through a protective layer.
Projected onto the thread surface are particle animations created in Houdini — fluid, organic systems with shifting colours that evoke the presence of water as a protective, amniotic environment. The pool expects water; its absence creates a rupture in perception. The work restores this missing element not literally, but symbolically — water as the earliest memory of safety, the enveloping space of the womb. The projections ripple and flow across the membrane in response to the presence of viewers, tracked by a Kinect sensor. As the audience moves through the installation, their bodies trigger and control different animations, making them active participants in the work's spatial and temporal logic.
The work holds space for comfort and vulnerability, protection and exposure — a membrane that shelters without isolating, that remembers safety as something fluid, surrounding, alive.
