Laurie Anderson & Brian Eno: Self Storage

4 April - 7 May 1995
Acorn Storage Centre, Wembley

Michael Callan's work for Self Storage

On the edge of London's mid-90s urban sprawl, stories told by Laurie Anderson led visitors through a labyrinth of installations by Brian Eno and a team of Royal College of Art students, the works interspersed with the hidden contents of hundreds of locked storage units.

In the immediate shadow of Wembley stadium stood (and still stands) the former Alcan Foil Factory. By 1995 the building, operated by Acorn Storage Centres, had been divided into 650 storage units and filled with the overflow of London's sprawling commercial and domestic expansion. As you walked down long metal corridors, all the spaces looked the same: a red metal door with a padlock, set in a grey sheet metal wall. But inside they were charged with a kind of intimacy, containing things hidden, protected. To have looked into one of these private spaces is to have looked 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 were 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. What came to be called the Acorn Research Cell was drawn from a wide range of disciplines across the RCA including photography, illustration and architecture, and its works ranged from a painter lying submerged in a tank of water to a complete recreation of a student bedsit. Eno and Anderson have both exhibited in visual arts domain extensively as well working in music-related fields, but Self Storage was their first site-specific project together.