Nowhere Is Where the Heart Is

At LEA24, temporarily supplanting the David and Goliath installation by Lemonodo Oh, is Nowhere Is Where the Heart Is, a creation by SaveMe Oh in which visitors can explore twelve environments and contemplate the connections between them. The construction is fairly simple: a dozen square enclosures of about forty square meters each, wrapped within by textures depicting a variety of real life scenes that might at first seem unrelated: the destroyed city of Homs, Tiananmen Square, the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, the Vatican, Red Square and the Kremlin, Anıtkabir (the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk), the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the Reichstag, the ruins of Palmyra, Kaaba, the Birkenau concentration camp, and "SaveMe Oh Square."

"Religion," said SaveMe as we talked, "is a recipe for trouble." (As are, by extension, zealous political beliefs.) On the mausoleum of Atatürk, she commented, "He wanted religion and state separated, but what his successor Erdogan sees is different." Housed within each of the squares is an additional scene, often in a barn, with animals and smaller artworks by SaveMe, and while these seem generally unrelated to the broader content the juxtaposition reflects the artist's wry sense of humor.

Always sort of the self-proclaimed rude underdog of the arts in Second Life, and often reviled and derided, SaveMe has written on her blog here about her conversation with Lemonodo and here about her squatting on LEA24, although her presence on the sim is somewhat by invitation. It's hard to say whether Nowhere Is Where the Heart Is will be gone later today or will last through its planned display time through the end of November.