un/making home
The 8th of November 2018, Al Maeishah is invited by ArtEZ (Zwolle, Netherlands), with Borderland and Rimini Protokoll, at the event HOME to reflect and elaborate during a day about home, inclusion, citizenship and the role of the arts.
ArtEZ studium generale is a catalyst for meaningful and radical ideas, projects and stories. As a Knowledge Curation Centre, ArtEZ studium generale selects, reflects and presents knowledge and organises (research) processes in a context where the knowledge domains of art, science and society come together.
Un/making home is meant to be the first stage of an ongoing process, to articulate stories and proposals around the “sense of home”, as well as to debunk perceptions of identity constantly biased by cultural and political messages:
“HOME recalls that space of confidence where familiarity, intimacy, safety and the habitable are built and negotiated. Nevertheless, sensing home goes beyond those laws and procedures trying to define and entrench it, be it through citizenship, tradition or membership. Making home is a basic human need that requires adaptation as the material and immaterial site filled with sense, values, routines, imagination, creating a cosmos of affection – its references can resonate beyond the local.
HOME is a cognitive image of an understandable and protective environment, it is the invention of forms of certainty. To fix HOME’s imaginary into a picture (or into protocols) – universally valid or locally insurmountable – means to freeze its cognitive capacity in a static box, which is paradoxical since HOME is constantly evolving in motion, expanding, inter-connected and transmitting. HOME’s limits maybe those one decides to accept or impose, while they remain potentially expansive. To imagine a future beyond borders hence means also to imagine a HOME beyond the borders of the domestic, as the sense and the ideas of HOME change from culture to culture as well as in time.
Observed at different scales, HOME defines the ‘I’ and the ‘WE’: the self, the couple, the family, the neighbourhood, the nation, the state, the transnational agreement. Al Maeishah itself gets inspiration and springs from a peculiar aspect of living the house and making home by exposing the Political, employing hospitality and neighbouring as radical political acts. By playing the three drivers, which guide our research – communal learning, hospitality/neighbouring and diaspora/exile – we mean to challenge and transgress the idea of power structures based on rootedness and the constraints imposed by biopolitics. We want to reclaim life as an open path for learning and pursuing well-being, where making home is also fabricated and re-learned through diaspora, encounter and in relation with the world – the ultimate HOME to humankind.
Where is HOME when a broad system of powers progressively operates to tear apart spaces of confidence? How to model new perspectives in this common state of precarity?”