Over the past year*, my research has been tracing how personal and collective histories of migration, sorrow, and loss shape perceptions of home. I listened, recorded, photographed, and collected fragments from people who had to leave their homes: from conversations with patients in psychiatric care, refugees arriving in Europe and the United States, and people who lost everything to war, to a fire, to a flood. I learned how fragile home is, both physically and metaphorically, and how quickly everything familiar and grounding can shift from one moment to the next.

I have observed a growing urgency in conversations about home in artistic practices, writings, public discussions, and political contexts, as well as among my colleagues, friends, and myself. What began as a personal artistic inquiry into notions of belonging has evolved into a collective practice that explores how we inhabit, imagine, remember, and feel at home, particularly in times of displacement and instability, of loss and change. I learned that often a place of gathering is referred to as home, and that the sense of belonging extends beyond a single place or nation. I discovered the transformative power of community - spending time together, building trust, and forming relationships that resist the binary of “us” and “them”. In The Living Room Project, Home is not a fixed object but a point of departure in a continuously growing, process-based archive. 

*The Living Room  research project is developed with support from the Archivolt research group at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, under the mentorship of Nico Dockx