The Home Project
It is the thinking of home that is home. Home, hearth, dwelling, sustenance, hominess, familiar, familial, known. Known by, or in, its absence. Home is a restlessness at the heart of rest. Proof that nothing is known or knowable.
Homecoming, homeland – what is that but a death? Nostalgia for a homeland is only possible when it is lost. Your home, my home, shared home, can it ever be contained and held? Is that the point?
Stay at home. Feel at home. Be home. These mandates have been encountered by many of us with such difficulty during lockdowns, whether because of a lack of physical home, an unsettled-ness at the site of home, or a longing to know or have a home that is not our own. To be at home with oneself or ones’ others presents yet another level of challenge, beyond the physical space, the place of home.
The idea of home, the desire for home, the pursuit of home underlies the motivations and movements of individuals, families, communities and nations. During the Covid-19 lockdowns and ‘stay at home’ orders, home was magnified as a site (place) of safety, security, and, often, overwhelming privilege. What is home? Is it a building? Property? A place of belonging and security? Is privacy? A space of hostility? Violence? Exclusivity and oppression? Is it a memory, mired in nostalgia? From national belonging and yearning for a ‘homeland’, to the domestic, mundane, household, home captures the imagination and determines consumer habits, migration paths, claims over ‘native land’ , indigeneity and sovereignty, and the securitisation of territorial borders.
The pursuit of home is a search for grounding. Are we prepared for this grounding to be intangible? Perhaps many people already live this way, but to admit it is to contradict modernity, contradict the progress, propertied, citizenship narrative of the modern world.
This project, culminating in a monograph publication, builds a philosophy of home. A vague, ambiguous, and largely unexplored pursuit of home is recognised as the epicentre from which current movements arise and unfold. From nationalism and perceived threats to ‘nation’ attributed to threats from migrants and migration fuelling right-wing populism and the rise of anti-migrant political parties and discourses; to the consolidation of the private home as a place of privacy where personal security is both sought and can be most intimately threatened; to the identification of home with yearning, both nostalgic and aspirational, the idea of home is under-explored. At the core of this philosophy of home is the idea that ‘home’ provides a basis for sociality, community and ultimately for our modern, legal and political order.
Dr Anastasia Tataryn, 2021. all rights reserved.
