Domestic Affairs

Domestic Affairs investigates the idea of home in body, structure and land, and explores the culturally embedded promise of security and hope engendered in the archetypal house. It explores a conceptual topography of “place”; it is a kind of domestic archeology.

 

The exploration of the concept of home can reveal deeply ambiguous and complex phenomena: its interface with identity, its connections to security vs. openness to difference and other, it can embody the sense of inclusion/exclusion, freedom/incarceration, movement/entrapment, displacement and belonging.

 

We tend to see home as a protective refuge of security and safety, a shelter from the storm. If so then what becomes of the homeless, the cutting loose of the subjects of exchangeable labor, the children born into diaspora? What happens to those consigned to live in the cracks and fissures of the world? What happens when we live in fear or hatred of otherness, homelessness and alterity?