Anywhere at Home

Post date: Jan 25, 2010 11:6:37 PM

My ongoing curatorial project entitled Anywhere at Home, consists of a series of events investigating different perceptions of "home" in our migrant and globalized age; the project will take place in different locations in Zurich - from art galleries to public spaces - using different media, involving artists Lamia Moghazy, Lada Nakonechna, Delia Popa and others.

In a quintessentially migrant age, the idea of home underwent dramatic changes. The traditional home was "the stable physical center of one's universe -- a safe and still place to leave and return to, and a principal focus of one's concern and control." (Nigel Rapport, Andrew Dawson (Eds), Migrants of Identity,1998). Population movement, travel, economy and communication make the globe a unified place so that no place is completely itself and separate, and no place is completely other. People are always and yet never "at home": always and never "at ease with the rhetoric of those with whom they share their lives". (M. Auge, 1995, Non-Places, 1995). 

There is also the paradox that often only by way of transience and displacement one achieves an ultimate sense of belonging. In order to be at home, it is necessary to become alienated and estranged to some degree, mentally or spiritually. Exile is a resource inasmuch as it gives on to that vantage point from which one is best able to come to know oneself best. It is for this reason too that home "moves" us most powerfully as absence or negation.

Movement has become fundamental to modern identity, and an experience of non-place (beyond "territory" and "society"), an essential component of everyday existence. The attainment of home itself, as an individual search, involves either or both physical and cognitive movement. What does home mean, in a world of transit points and temporary dwellings (waiting-rooms, stations, refugee camps, malls, hotels) where individual itineraries momentarily converge?