Home:Bodies
A reflection as an artist-in-residence at Dblspce
My residency at Dblspce (themed 'Embodied Kinships' began with my attempt to archive and remember my childhood home, drawing inspiration from Gaston Bachelard's Poetic of Space, where the house is imagined as a vessel - a space where dreams unfold and memory takes form. It is through sentimentalising space, that we reconnect our states of being across boundaries of time and distance. 
My co-resident Shibukawa Tomomi (@slowlytomomi) joined me a few days later. Her practice explores how the gestures of everyday communal activities can shape kinships and be subtle forms of resistance. She was inspired by Jenny Odell’s concept of doing ‘nothing’ as a way to resist the clutches of capitalism and that the experience of life is the goal. We had lengthy conversations on what makes a house a ‘home’ and how does leaving, moving and building new homes create opportunities to know the Self? So we decided to run a workshop/ open session where we shared both our sojourn in different places/spaces and invited the public to explore notions and nuances of a 'home' together. We were heartened by the responses that came through, most were in the form of drawings and prose, while others in poetry and objects.
Yet the poetics of home must also be read against its politics: questions of labour, loss, precarity, and kinship stretched across distance rise to the surface. What about those whose homes are absent - migrants, refugees, victims of war and domestic abuse? If the house shelters daydreams, Marc Auge reminds us that non-places - transit zones, waiting rooms, borders - are defined by impermanence and anonymity. Home, then is shaped not only by dwelling within walls but also by dislocation; absence itself becomes a site of meaning, a lesson in what it means to be unmoored. Perhaps, it is in our oscillation between intimacy and impermanence that we carry kinship and begin to sense the most of our selfhood - somewhere between spaces that cradle our imagination and in transient places that hold our unsettling dreams. 
