The history of our present moment, defined by the mass isolation of people indoors sheltered from the coronavirus pandemic, has not only forced the people home but also has turned life - as we knew it - upside down; our routines, our economy, our politics and very specially the way we connect with each other may have changed forever. Mobility and human contact have been severely limited, our narrative on the household may have changed forever too, ‘finding ourselves looking at a world we know well but have never seen from such an angle before’. (Bryson, 2016)

A place, an idea, a state of mind; - home has a very personal and different meaning for each individual and can be/ has been represented and interpreted in a wide variety of manners. An abstract and shifting container in which we commit our feelings to memory by encoding, storing, embodying and bringing back life experiences, home could be the guiding thread to collect visual records reflecting human inner and outer ebbs and tides currently and over time. The notions linked to the home are various; from its emotional significance, to the home as an experience shell, a physical structure, a more conceptual existential sphere, or to acknowledging home as a key locus in which cultural activity, expression and identities (individual and societal) forge and reveal.  (Sixsmith, 1986, p. 282)

BHAFH takes off as a pop-up participatory journal suggesting different ways of sorting out our personal interactions with the idea of the home, a fluctuating concept worth revisiting, questioning and reconnecting with and suggests a playful guideline outlining the mechanisms of human remembrance and their relation in the imagery in the visual arts to draft some understanding of histories of the home in the near future, foster a collective recount and record of an historical time; for further inspirational readings of our perception of the homely at the present moment.

This is home to me, but what is home to you?

Published by hvo in Uncategorised