1 of those times when thought & practice are galaxies apart. the frustration of (wo)man's creative life is things rarely outshine the imagination

and this didn't even come close! . . .


“Our lives are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative, with the stories that we tell and hear told, those we dream or imagine or would like to tell, all of which are reworked in that story of our lives that we narrate to ourselves in an episodic, sometimes semi-unconscious, but virtually uninterrupted monologue.� - Peter Brook, from Fortier, Anne-Marie, Migrant Belongings:Memory, Space and Identity, Oxford: Berg, 2000

Home is . . .

Initially researching homelessness, our investigations reduced down into one essential question: What is ‘home’? Then further, how is it performed, expressed, projected? It is clear that ‘home’ is a concept embedded deep in the heart of each and every culture, and yet it is also unavoidably personal and subjective, born from values and perceptions of not only a given community, but also of any individual whom interacts within that given sphere. “‘Home’ involves a ‘unique synthesis’: ‘an aspect of life and at the same time a special way of forming, reflecting and interrelating the totality of life’.� [Simmel, Georg, ‘Female Culture’ in Georg Simmel: On Women, Sexuality and Love, ed. G. Oakes, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984 (1911)]

We offer our presentation to you in a form of participatory analytical documentary, rooted in sound and space, a venture into perception and apperception a la Chris Marker, perpetually aware of the elasticity of boundaries and the ephemerality of any definitive universal referential centre, and of the ongoing dialogue of cultural investigations. Chris Loscher’s story, performed through interview, is the heart, yes- the home of our own, the point of departure from which we each endeavour to follow our own journeys out into the macro/micro-cosmos, engaging in negotiations of cultures (our own, each others, and those perceived beyond the walls of our bodies, our minds, and Goldsmiths itself) through which our own didactic reflexive processes might encourage a wider exploration into the nature of home. Further how does each space interact to form a dialogue that serves to paint a bigger picture more complete? In the performance of cultural identities, does our sense of home determine the stance from which a culture is both viewed and performed and vice versa?

Inspired in part by Lars Von Trier’s Dogville, the three-dimensionality of one’s conditioned perceptions is challenged through our abstracted representations of the house’s edificial structure, merely indicative and representative of one that is otherwise filled with subjective meaning; to encourage us to question the origin of our own assumptions and perceptions of what home might be, and how/where it manifests as both source and destination and is thus performed. The flatness subverts further the architectural declaration of space/time that is presented through the Great Hall itself, which itself serves as the formal and ceremonial epicentre of life here, the point of entry and departure, the symbolic home or heart of Goldsmiths College . . .

‘Our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe; a real sense of cosmos in every sense of the word.’ – Bachelard’s Poetics of Space