This blogpost is a summary of a tutorial with my tutor Emma Drye that focused on the parallel project and critical review, as well as a beginning research into some of the artists and aspects that came up during our video call.

My parallell project is centered around the changes that we are making in an odd, old house, including many peculiar objects left behind by the former owners. I am using this house as a nexus of narratives about the village and its inhabitants and relationships. As a family, we had originally planned on renovating the house while living in Lisbon- instead we suddenly moved here full time overnight at the beginning of lockdown due to the Covid 19 outbreak and so merged our own story as a family with the place at this peculiar time. While deconstructing the home it is a dissonant place with too many influences. On one hand I am trying to listen to the crazy patterns and angles, on another I am wanting to strip everything down to calm and quiet Scandinavian views, and on yet another impulse, I am gluing eyes and spiders to the walls for the site specific installation.

I was concerned with my parallel project taking off in too many directions and becoming too diverse and becoming difficult to coalescence into one body of work. My tutor encouraged me though to embrace the multiple , versatile aspect of it. She compared it to a family or the movements of a symphony- both images that really resonate with me. The notion of having to  achieve something coherent and beautiful is not contemporary any more. Instead I can allow all the different aspects to come forth, it could for example be seen as a series of rooms , one more emotional, the other more rational, the family room and so on and let the artworks speak to each other. So for example an empty room with chairs and cast shadows speak about tension and loneliness, a much more private work . (Shortlink:https://wp.me/pbt6jU-tD) On the other hand, the project took a social turn in a video that I did with my partners family, using many left over items from the house to build a symbolical “home” as a team/familybuilding activity. Emma Drye found the video caring and responsible while still leaving space around what was said in the interviews.

In many of the works, especially the intuitive painting pieces, for example on stripped down wallpaper (Shortlink https://wp.me/pbt6jU-tg) or on showercurtains (Shortlink https://wp.me/pbt6jU-sH) I suddenly see eyes appear. Emma Drye commented on a missing piece from the intuitive markmaking to suddenly eyes or a face. How and why am I including faces? As eyes appear frequently, she encouraged me to look closer at how to draw eyes- looking at Rembrandts etchings for example.

We continued speaking about the Critical Review. Home and belonging are two ideas which overlap and are my first key words that keep coming up. I will start my research around these and look for a question emerging that can become the red thread of the Critical review. We discussed exclusion and inclusion. Emma suggested that the globalization of the internet and modern life might cause an anxiety or sense of threat in some which may make nostalgia and things like nationalism or the local feel safe and attractive. That may or may not relate to the theme, but she pointed out how belonging  always is a two sided coin and often has winners and losers.

So far, I have looked at 5 different approaches to Home and Belonging :

1. Landart – directly using the the elements available to address universal, general themes , the immediacy creates a sense of belonging. Artists like Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy stand out here, working directly with the land that is familiar and home for them. 

I feel very touched by the art of Ana Mendieta who is often using her own body, and the elements of earth, water, air and fire to connect to nature. She left her native Cuba very young to come to the USA and said “I was torn away from the Motherland- one of the reasons I have gone back to work with nature”. During this course, my own practice has been pushed further away from traditional drawing and painting on paper or canvas. I started using my own body for full body prints and created a Landart installation with sticks as a nest, where I then lie down naked for a photo session, also with my daughter and granddaughter.  (Shortlink https://wp.me/pbt6jU-qD) It was a beautiful and highly symbolical act for me to painstakingly build the nest with sticks from the surrounding fruit trees that we had been pruning- connecting drawing in space with this land that has welcomed us, with the fruits of earth, to create a symbol of our staying and feeling safe and welcome- a nest.

There is a quality of touch, a sensual quality to the work, when being covered in paint, or in sand or when scratching the hands on the many twigs of the nest, that becomes an important part of the experience. When looking at the photos of Ana Mendieta’s series “Silueta”, I can feel that same visceral, tactile quality of the work. There is a quest here for a sense of home in nature and in her own body. I would be curious to explore Ana Mendieta’s work in more detail.

2. Home as a subject- when a specific place is recurrent and the main subject of the work, like for example Georges Shaw’s paintings from scenes of the council estate where he grew up or Andrew Wyeth.

3. Home as the place of the work, like for example Jeremy Deller creating an exhibition in his own house . This is in a sense what I am creating here at the moment with my parallel project- transforming the house itself , so it becomes both the place and the subject of the artwork.

4. Artists dealing with the lack of home and belonging, like for example a huge amount of refugee artists. Here I can for example mention Anahita Razvani Rad who came to Britain 15 years ago and is  painting war scenes from Iran.

I am also thinking of the three dimensional work “On longing” by Melanie Walker that I saw in an exhibition in “the Carpintarias St Lazaro” in Lisbon earlier this year and that left a lasting impression on me. In this work she has combined textiles with photography so that the images are hanging and the viewer can walk through them.  

 

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Walker is using the image of a house as a metaphor addressing themes of longing for belonging, a home, homelessness  on the search for a safe home. Her figures are all carrying this metaphorical home on/in their heads.

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• (my photos from the visit)

5. Excluded even when you are included, here I mentioned my own experience at always being the foreigner, no matter how many fruit trees I plant here and in a wider sense- how modern life and increased use of the internet leads to a general feeling of alienation and isolation.  

 

Emma Drye also sent me a long list of interesting articles, podcasts and writers that could be starting points for wider research. I am starting here to take a look at some of the suggested.

     In the article  “Art and belonging ; On Place, displacement and placelessness, Alsion Young takes a look at the role of street art in connection to these themes. 

Click to access Nuart-Journal_vol1-no2-05_Alison-Young.pdf

These are some sentences  I found most interesting as starting points:

“the work of artists such as Ian Strange, Francis Alÿs, and Stanislava Pinchuk, who make art located in displacement, dislocation, and dispossession. How can art respond to the now widespread phenomenon of displacement and disconnection from place? How can street art engage with placelessness? What can placelessness and displacement teach us that we might use to resist the co-optation of street art from place-making to place selling?To pose some possible answers, or to begin a conversation around these questions, I consider here work by three artists. Two have been known in the past as street artists or graffiti writers; one has always been considered a fine artist. All three combine multiple practices in their work. All work in and away from their ‘home’ location; all of them seek to problematise ideas of place, home, and the inhabitation of space In Ian Strange’s work, the home itself becomes a vacant site of trauma and loss; in Alys’s work the mundane acts of urban life such as walking, freighted with uncertainty of meaning, show how we require fences and borders for meaning and order; and in Pinchuk’s work, we see how the places that we take for granted are always about to be overwhelmed by a wave or to collapse into an earthquake or to be destroyed by war or radiation – the things we hold on to are always on the point of being lost. Despite what developers seek to communicate to us about art in urban space as a guarantor of the value of property, these artworks of displacement tell us that in every place we are on the verge of placelessness; in each of our possessions lies the moment of our future dispossession.”

The TATE has a podcast on Art and Belonging that brought many interesting definitions and voices of different artists.

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rothko-red-on-maroon-t01165/art-belonging

In this podcast,  they explore what it means to belong. How can art make us feel part of something, how can it help us to connect with ourselves and others? Here artists, an author and a poet reflect on their experiences of art and belonging:Tracey Chevalier, Lubaina Himid, Andrew Mashigo, Anahita Razvani-Rad, John Hegley, and Corey Samuel.

To belong- to feel an affinity with something

I think I belong in the person I ve become

Belonging- a sense of being at home, of being a part of a place

Lubaina Himid: I came to Britain when I was 4 months old ,(…) and in those 60 odd years in between, I have negotiated ways of how to feel part of this place. But if you are a person who has come from somewhere else, and everyday people ask you where you are from, you develop a script. Of course my script reads that I am from Zanzibar, and it sounds like a movie, it sounds exotic, and other, and then it becomes more important than anything else

Anahita Razvani Rad: Since 14 years in the UK, I paint Homesickness, immigration, identity, memory, dealing with all of that, in order to explain that to myself I started painting from photos what you get in the media here, war, soldiers, women in black tchador. I was living during the war for 8 years in Iran and my paintings still keep me part of it, they keep me grounded, its a kind of homesickness, trying to still be part of the life, the country I left 15 years ago.

To belong, to feel connected and content in the moment. I started looking at my life as the small things that make it all together, like noticing the light in the summer mornings in the north of England Noticing the details, not as much belonging in a bigger political sense, but I think I belong in the person I have become

To belong- to feel a sense of recognition

So in this podcast, several definitions of belonging stand out:

To belong- to feel an affinity with something

To belong, to feel connected and content in the moment

Belonging- a sense of being at home, of being a part of a place

To belong- to feel a sense of recognition

This is a quote found by Emma Drye, (from BEGINNING WITH BELONGING AND NONBELONGING IN DERRIDA’S THOUGHT: A Therapeutic Reflection Author(s): Charles E. Scott Source: Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal , Fall/Winter 1991, Vol. 74, No. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 1991), pp. 399-409 Published by: Penn State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/41178547)

“The thought I want to pursue is that in belonging together as we do we are also in a situation that I shall call nonbelonging. I mean that there is something about language and tradition to which we cannot belong”

The Cambridge dictionary defines the meaning of belonging:

to be in the right place or a suitable place

to feel happy or comfortable in a situation

Google definition:

an affinity for a place or situation.

Synonyms of belonging in the Oxford dictionary:

SYNONYMS. affiliation, acceptance, association, attachment, connection, union, integration, closeness. rapport, fellow feeling, fellowship, kinship, partnership.

Definition of belonging in the Oxford dictionary:

the feeling of being comfortable and happy in a particular situation or with a particular group of people. to feel a sense of belonging

I am really quite surprised by the “happy” and “comfortable” that seems to be associated with belonging in the more common defintions, as I am sure you can feel belonging to a very ugly and uncomfortable place for example and not be happy about it. Also, I believe a catastrophe or an extreme and terrible situation like a war would bring people together with a sense of belonging that is neither happy nor comfortable.

I continue my research with an exhibition about Psycho buildings at the Southbank centre that Emma Drye recommended, and which luckily, The Guardian did an “in pictures” for:

https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/venues/hayward-gallery/past-exhibitions/psycho-buildings-artists-take-architecture  https://www.theguardian.com/culture/gallery/2008/may/28/psycho.buildings  

This exhibition brought together the work of artists who create habitat-like structures and architectural environments that are perceptual and physical spaces as much as psychological ones. Visitors were invited to immerse themselves in ten atmospheric and unsettling installations that explored and questioned the way we relate to our surroundings.

Artists included: Atelier Bow-Wow (Japan), Michael Beutler (Germany), Los Carpinteros (Cuba), Gelitin (Austria), Mike Nelson (UK), Ernesto Neto (Brazil), Tobias Putrih (Slovenia), Tomas Saraceno (Argentina), Do-Ho Suh (Korea) and Rachel Whiteread (UK).

Ernesto Neto

Neto’s installations are large, soft, biomorphic sculptures that fill an exhibition space that viewers can touch, poke, and walk on or through. They are made of white, stretchy material—amorphous forms stuffed with Styrofoam pellets or aromatic spices. The shapes and the sheer scale of Netos work is really impressive. There is something very organic to them, a little like walking inside a living organism.

Michael Beutler

Beutler takes existing architectural elements and transforms them into constructions that evolve into installations. These compositions, in turn, inherently unite a dual function that is both architecture and sculpture.

For the above exhibition he arrived with a huge amount of tissue paper that he then installed directly on site.

Los Carpinteros

“Show Room” by Los Carpinteros was made from Ikea and B&Q furniture, painstakingly taken apart in a mock-explosion and hung from thin steel wires. It looked like a massive and impactful installation, like stepping into the midst of an explosion.

It reminded me of Cornelia Parkers “Exploded shed”, which I found more subtle , also in the way it worked with light, and in a way more effective as it touched something more personal.

(Belonging through recognition)

Another work by Los Carpinteiros that I found interesting is a shelf of drawers in the shape of a hand grenade, also in between the familiar and homey and the dangerous.

Gelitin

An artists group from Austria, they are known for creating sensational art events in the tradition of Relational Aesthetics, often with a lively sense of humor.

For this exhibition, they created a boating lake complete with dock and three small wooden boats, installed on one of the Hayward’s sculpture terraces, where visitors could row around.

Rachel Whiteread

Rachel Whiteread’s installation for this exhibition was made up of 200 doll’s houses from her personal collection, assembled over the last 20 years.

In Tate shots; I wanted to preserve the everyday, I wanted to give authority to some of the more forgotten things, stopping it in time and casting it in something solid

A thoughtprocess that has been illustrated by sculpture

Looking at the domestic in terms of realtionships with people and the relationship that people have with their homes, relationships people have with their furniture and trying to bring all those things together ( see Daniel Miller, the Comfort of things)

and quietly talk about some of the darker things

cast from the space under the bed (shallow breath) in plaster, later in Amber in rubber

House 1993, I am very proud of it, its a real sense of achievement

quite extraordinary sculpture that touched people in many different ways

mummify the air in a room, solidify

Mike Nelson

contemporary British installation artist. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2011

Nelson’s installations always only exist for the time period of the exhibition which they were made for. They are extended labyrinths, which the viewer is free to find their own way through, and in which the locations of the exit and entrance are often difficult to determine.

His major installation The Coral Reef (2000), was on display at Tate Britain until the end of 2011. It consists of fifteen rooms and a warren of corridors. In 2019, from March to October, he transformed the Duveen Galleries in Tate Britain with his new installation called ‘The Asset Strippers’, a collection of objects from post-war Britain that framed his childhood.

Emma Drye also provided a lot of possible background philosophy etc if I want to look deeper into the ideas that we discussed. Here I am doing a quick search, which is not an in- depth referenced research, just an overview to choose what to research further:

Edward Said – on orientalism

Orientalism (1978), a critique of the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism—how the Western world perceives the Orient

“So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab–Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have, instead, is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world, presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.

— “Islam through Western Eyes” (1980) The Nation.^[43]”

The person who loves his home is immature

Jacques Derrida on being alone and knowing other people

deconstruction

“there is no out-of-context” (il n’y a pas de hors-texte).

relational aestetics, we do not belong to anyone

Judith Butler on being more than one thing at a time

who you are is fluid, it is not a rigid notion

Stuart Hall on the diaspora and being away from home

Community/ cultural cultural entanglement hybridity

Miwon Kwonon place and site

a Korean curator and art history educator. Her work focuses on contemporary art, land art and site-specific art. She is the author of One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity,

Daniel Miller on making a home  

A set of portraits through collected objects- essays , see Sarah Sze collecting household objects for her installations

I am currently reading  the book “The Comfort of things” which makes very poignant and interesting connections between things and relationships to people

Portait 1 “empty” , p. 8 “There is a violence to such emptiness (…) There is a loss of shape, discernment and integrity”

Portrait 2 “full” p.31″from this family one learns the artisanal form of love, care and devotion, performed with such subtle grace, creativity and imagination thatbthe ways persons become objects of care and objects become subjects of relationship blend imperceptibly with each other in the overall fullness and artistry of these lives.

In art :

Nicolas Bourriaud – relational aesthetics

seeks to offer different criteria by which to analyse the often opaque and open-ended works of art of the 1990s. To achieve this, Bourriaud imports the language of the 1990s internet boom, using terminology such as user-friendliness, interactivity and DIY (do-it-yourself).^[12] In his 2002 book Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, Bourriaud describes Relational Aesthetics as works that take as their point of departure the changing mental space opened by the internet

Bourriaud explores the notion of relational aesthetics through examples of what he calls relational art. According to Bourriaud, relational art encompasses “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.” The artwork creates a social environment in which people come together to participate in a shared activity. Bourriaud claims “the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist

Clare Bishop – participatory hells  

Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012) is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, best known in the U.S. as “social practice.” In it, Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic.

Her 2004 essay titled “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” which was published in October, remains an influential critique of relational aesthetics

Artists  mentioned:

Nicole Wermers

Wermers creates sculptures, collages and installations which explore the appropriation of art and design within consumer culture. She lets objects speak hinting at personalities.

She is interested in how physical infrastructure determines social infrastructure.

Infrastruktur 2015- a series of chrome chairs with fur coats. The coats have an extra new lining, incorporating the chair into the jacket.

Very fleeting, temporary observation you can make in a cafe or restaurant when somebody puts their jacket on the back of a chair in order to claim that little bit of public space, they can privatize it for themselves.

Ceramic tear off notes, heavy , at the same time white- devoid of content. oldfashioned way of communicating

private space vs public space

These are ideas I would also like to look further into.

Rachel Whiteread (see above)

Cornelia Parker (see separate blogpost https://wp.me/pbt6jU-c8)

the materiality is a major part of the work, the materials used and the process become the work

documenting overlooked objects from famous places

the exploded shed

Cindy Sherman

Literally changing identity when acting out different characters in her self portraits

inclusion-exclusion

Jeremy Deller

Here we spoke about the “the Battle of Orgreaves”,  reenactment of the minors strike- lead to international fame and later the Turner prize. Public involvment, performance

“social cartographer, psychogeographer, catalyst and Turner Prize winning artist, participatory projects “We are here because we are here”…  a real personal impact on the viewer

Open Bedroom 1993, the parents went for holidays and Deller took over the house and made an exhibition https://www.jeremydeller.org/OpenBedroom/OpenBedroom.php

Graffitti from the mens toilet in the British Library exhibited on the walls of the toilet etc, it spread around the house

from 1996 working with the public, getting a brass band playing acid /house works together with other directors

Strong and stable my arse

reenactment of the battle at Somme

No object left after the event, but it is documented by the public and spread through social media. Deller is not actively partaking on social media, but is very aware of the use of it and how the public will spread awareness of the work through social media. Also the work exists in peoples memories

Social surrealism, Social movements and music and how they relate

the play between the public and the work

Sarah Sze

creates large scale installations with a wide array of objects, she explores the edge between life and art, how something very familiar becomes unfamiliar. the viewer sees every day objects with a sense of dicovery

In the Venice Biennale – US Pavillion 2013-  household objects, scale in relationship to my body

Paint- how paint behaves in the space

Improvisation is key

Andrew Cranston  

I really enjoyed discovering the paintings of Andrew Cranston. I am always drawn to works that contain a narrative, especially when it is quite subtle like here and remains a little mysterious or dream like. I also liked that he uses old hard cover books as supports- the painting becoming an object and is more intimate, you can imagine holding it in your hands.

(Images from:Inglebygallery. 2020. Ingleby gallery. [Online]. [2 September 2020]. Available from: https://www.inglebygallery.com/exhibitions/7082/works/artworks56552/)

Guy Ben Ner – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3yBQT9mfnw

           the whole family of the artist participate in a sort of soap opera filmed in various IKEA showrooms- it looks like home but is a simulacrum, a false version of something that is supposed to be important, consumerism

I find really interesting in this work, that Guy Ben Ner manages to tick all of the 5 points that I listed as different approaches above- 1.he is using the objects around him directly (Land/Houseart), 2.the subject is the home, and it is 3.made at site, but then it is also a 4.non-place and a simulacrum so 5. all the feeling of belonging falls away and we are just waiting for the security guard to appear.

It is quite hilarious, to see the action among the furniture with dangling price tags, and passers by entering the scene unknowingly. At one point, the son asks the father what private property is. ” It means that this house belongs to us. We are the only ones who have the right to use it. And most important- we have the right to exclude others from using it. -Exclude? – Exactly so, you can claim something as yours the moment you kick others out of it. Private property creates borders, son. The conversation then goes backwards from one owner to the oprevious until the daughter adds, that it started with hunter and gatherers, and suddenly someone claimed land and the others had to pay rent. Strange, as she sais. Further the father explains inheritance and how it holds the property from leaking out. Love is the only thing in the world that does not have a price tag. we can not buy or sell love. Love is what holds the family together. And we hold the property together avoiding it from leaking out, concludes the daughter What about sharing? asks the daughter Father: Sharing is so primitive honey. Animals share.We evolved, do you want to live in a herd? We evolved and rose on our two feet so we can free our hands and point on objects and say- this is mine, we freed our fingers so that we can count Time is a way to calculate an objects value Daughter Children of the future release yourselves from the shackles of the past

In the tutorial, Emma Drye also reminded me that I can centre the Critical Review around my own work. “Remember you can use your own work and circumstances. For example, “a family arrives: notions of belonging and home in my practice” is an open question which you could then support with case studies of other artists you could compare your own experience to. You would need to define hone and belonging, describe and evaluate your practice and make a case for the various elements of your definitions of the two terms in your work. “

Here I take a look on how my own work fits into the different approaches I defined at the start of this post:

1. Landart

The Nest, using raw materials directly from the land // Ana Mendieta

2. The home as a subject- my whole // project centered around the house and the different narratives connected to it- also through the left over objects

the social aspect (the video)

3. Home- a site-specific artwork, A modern cavepainting- the sketchbooks on the walls, site specific art work, merging 2-3

4. Non place, sense of isolation or non belonging

the chairs as a symbol of loneliness

5. excluded even if you are included, expressing the lack of felt sense of belonging

What does home and belonging mean to me?

I believe that after a long detour looking at artists working specifically with ideas of the home/house or homesickness or belonging in a clearer sense, I have come to realize that what I am most interested in exploring is the felt sense of it. What art does strike that feeling of recognition with me? I had looked more deeply into Rachel Whiteheads art and am blown away by the genius of casting the space under the bed in “Shallow Breath” or the massive and ingenius project of “House”, which raise many questions around the everyday, the overlooked, the home, but it does not feel like the questions I am asking myself.

So I started out with focusing on the parallel project and this definition:

Belonging- a sense of being at home, of being a part of a place

But I have arrived at being more curios at looking at

To belong- to feel a sense of recognition

There is a sense of recognition when I look at the work of Ana Mendieta. A search for belonging that I can understand. Where home and belonging would be coming home to my body and feel the elements around me, rather than identifying belonging to a house, or a country.

When I look at the paintings by Karin Mamma Andersson, there s a different sense of recognition. There is something deeply Swedish, resonating with the dark deep forests of my Northern childhood memories, even if the narratives of the paintings are obscure. There is a certain darkness  there that also feels like home. I have watched several documentary movies around the work of Karin Mamma Andersson, and it would not be possible to pin down her narratives to any specific subject, she seems to be very intuitive in her choice of very different imagery that inspire her, and has collected an impressive image bank to work with. Despite that there is a note in her work that sounds like a distant home for me.

(Images from: Friedmann, S. 2020. Stephen Friedmann Gallery. [Online]. [2 September 2020]. Available from: https://www.stephenfriedman.com/artists/26-mamma-andersson/)

I just watched an interview with Karen Mamma Andersson on American television Twilight talks. The interviewer also points out that the paintings are very Swedish, to which Andersson just laughs. But she goes on to explain how the surrounding dark, with the long winters that you start feeling in your body even at the end of June when the days get shorter, of course influences you to the very core.

A very different artist: I have recently discovered the work of Nijdeka Akunyili Crosby and find it fascinating how the layers of how she identifies herself flow into her work. She uses her family album, her own experience, plants from Nigeria and plants from America and wants to talk about that space between being a Nigerian artist in America. I come from a very, very different background, but there is again a sense of recognition in the multilayered complexity of being . The artist creates individuals that are multifacetted, like a woman with an oldfashioned hairstyle from the countryside but a high fashion dress that speaks to cosmopolitan life in Lagos and the setting might be modern architecture in New York, but with a TV set from the 80’s, so it is impossible to put either the character nor the setting in a clearly defined box- because it doesn’t exist. What you see makes sense but you don’t know what you are looking at because it doesn’t exist.

There are more and more people who for various reasons live in many spaces simultaneously at the same time and this is where Nijdeka Akunyili Crosby wants to get with her work, to these multilayered spaces where you slip in and out.

Maybe being Swedish- German with a half Lithuanian daughter and half British- half Swedish/German/ Lithuanian granddaughter and Portuguese partner and having lived in at least 30-40 places all over Europe, Australia and Asia before quite suddenly arriving and trying to settle in this very odd and also multifacetted house in the Portuguese countryside, there is a confusion in the narrative that I recognize as home.

So where does this leave the question for the critical review?

I believe i have lost the key word “home” as it has become less relevant than the felt sense of belonging. The “home” is still very present in my practice as the work that I am doing is happening around the narratives connected to a specific house. But it is really this deeper recognition that is interesting here, and how someone else can sense it from a very different place or being.

Becoming part of a narrative- Notions of belonging in my own practice and looking at other artists.

Belonging as a sense of recognition in my own practice and that of other artists

Five aspects of belonging with examples from my own practice and looking at other artists

(coming back to the list at the top of this post)

The deconstruction of a house- exploring a sense of belonging

How can I express a sense of belonging in my work?

How can my work make me feel part of something, how can it help me to connect with ourselves and others? Connect with a place?

Reconnect to the house

To be continued…

Gregor Schneider

Gordon Matta Clarke

Kurt Schwitters Merz bau