About the topic

Photo
Photo by Jassy Earl

I am fascinated by the fluidity of the world. People move across borders. Immigration is a natural part of our every day, changing the places we live and those who live in them. The news flows past as rapidly changing pictures. Technology moves at an ever-increasing speed. All of this, makes up a world where the slow, the present, the stable is something worth exploring. This connects directly to the concept of home, often being portrayed in art as something safe, calm and happy. This arises some questions: Is home a place or a feeling? How much time needs to pass before a new (sometimes not-permanent) home really becomes a home? What can a feeling of unbelonging do to a young person?

—Kristofer Blindheim Granskag

Following the work around the theme of Migration in the PUSH project we opened up the topic to a broader, artistic exploration of home and how our relationship with that idea influences our identity, our sense of safety or lack thereof, and what happens when we use homes or streets where people live as spaces where artists and the public meet.

Over a year of activity, we asked questions such as:

  • Does home have a different meaning for children? 
  • How are we impacting on children by portraying home in theatre and dance as a place of cosiness and safety where this is not their experience of life? 
  • How does our experience of place create identity and belonging, both of which are essential to an understanding of home? 
  • How much is a sense of home connected to ‘physical' space or place and notions of permanence. What is it to live in the middle spaces where sometimes nowhere feels fully like home? 
  • Is wherever I lay my hat, my home? privilege, assumption, exclusion? 
  • How does our relationship to our environment - built and natural - affect and inform our sense of self, place and home? 
  • How do experiences of migration inform the place-making that is involved in making a home? 
  • Do we really know who lives in our cities as immigration itself diversifies, with immigrants from new countries moving in, resulting in an increasing and/or changing range of nationalities? 
  • Do elements of our home affect the art we make – landscape, language, culture, bodily expressions, rituals, communal storytelling, history? 
  • What are the non-permanent and non-human aspects / qualities of home?

Home was hosted by:

Lab (January 2019) - Imaginate, Scotland
Residency (June 2019) - Krokusfestival, Belgium
Festival Presentation (December 2019) - Showbox (Scenekunstbruket), Norway