Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro are included in Superposition, a multi-day festival of performance, music, nightlife, visual art and conversation taking place across Penrith and the Blue Mountains.
Extending across the towns, the festival brings together artistic, ecological, scientific and community practices, exploring ideas of place, time, loss and connection while imagining possibilities for shared futures.
Claire & Sean present Luxury Problems, a site-specific video installation documenting the abandoned hotels of Hachijojima, Japan. Once promoted as the ‘Hawaii of Japan’ during the economic boom of the 1960s and 70s, these hotels have remained dormant for nearly three decades as Japanese tourists shifted towards international destinations.
Filmed through geometrically framed sequences inspired by Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, the work pairs images of the deserted hotels with narration drawn from vintage tourist brochures, creating a contrast between past optimism and present-day decay. Installed within a hotel room in the Blue Mountains, Luxury Problems draws parallels between the two destinations, examining the complex relationship between tourism and local communities, and considering what happens to a place when tourism disappears.
Having lived in the Blue Mountains for over three decades, Claire & Sean bring a local perspective to these questions, reflecting on the changing relationship between place, industry and community.
