SARGOS by Mark & Chet

Survivalism is mostly a joke constructed by DIY YouTubers, neoconservative preppers, and the decreasingly relevant Discovery Channel. While the market surrounding the aesthetic is mostly superficial, at the heart of this idea is one of true creativity and discovery. As we live in a world seemingly bent on its own death, we as artists look for the narrow windows of opportunity to flourish. In considering the necessity to go “off the grid”, it became clear to us that our foundational art skills were ideally suited to create space to live within. While this is not a novel area of art to explore, unlike artists like Andrea Zittel, we are not looking to further aestheticize it. Instead, we seek to promote a practical application of skills largely thought to be useless.

Art may be the original human language. Before writing, religion, and possibly even speech, there was an understanding of creating the forms needed to survive. We intend to offer our own inquiry into the primal forms of existence through the mediated language of art as a way of connecting us all to our own ultimate fate.

There are several examples of these dwellings and communities that exist both as practical outcomes and as theoretical products. While this includes the remarkable emergence of fully realized underhoused communities such as those in the Santa Ana River basin, they also intersect people and institutions such as Dick Proenekke (Alone in the Wilderness), calearth.org, This Old House, Doomsday Preppers (as well as Not-So-Doomsday Preppers), Waco Branch Davidians, Overlanding, Owen and Beru, Cave People, Inland Empire Construction Workers, Van-Life/Wanderlust Bloggers, Truck Stops, etc.