HELPERS CHANGING HOMES
Summary
HELPERS CHANGING HOMES is a project that investigates the multifarious definitions of homes and how small objects help to make any place a home, especially for those whose lives are nomadic or frequently uprooted.
“What makes a place your home? How do you conceptualize this, if home is constantly changing? How do you fill the void of a home you have moved away from?”
Supported by
The Dowse Art Museum, Wellington, New Zealand
The School of Creative Arts at the Massey University, Wellington, NZ
Asia Pacific Art Foundations, NZ
Goethe Institute, Berlin
Allied Pickfords, Wellington, NZ
Wellington City Council, Wellington, NZ
Hell’s Pizza, Wellington, NZ
Description of project
During my artist residency in Wellington, New Zealand, I sought to portray individual views about how a handful of portable personal objects help people to make a sense of home. I conducted qualitative interviews with thirty adults, who have moved around multiple nations both voluntarily and involuntarily.
My interviews focused on the interviewees’ relationships to small objects that moved around with them to all locations in order to understand the following two aspects in depths. Firstly, I investigated persons’ individual methods that they have mastered that helped them to make any place their home. Secondly, I studied how notions of “home” are defined after relocating multiple times, which for many of them will continue.
After conducting interviews, I created a portrait of each person as a shelter resembling their objects made out of cardboard boxes. In the next step, I commemorated the experiences of my interviewees in a symbolic way. I orchestrated a filmed performance, where they enacted movements of a hermit crab, a creature who regularly swaps its shell–or home—for a new one in order to grow.
As documentation, I scanned the sculptural objects as well as the interviewees’ bodies and made pendants that represented their personal homes. By doing so, I wanted to give a piece of extremely personal jewellery piece that crystalizes the person’s heritage and the past experiences of uprooting, which can accompany her/him in the future.
The project is now leading to a second iteration that also focuses on oral history with interviews conducted in late 2020 specifically of teenagers who live between multiple homes.
Type of work
Video Curated exhibition (online due to COVID-19)
Published in
Critical Costume Exhibition 2020: Costume Agency
Link to web site
https://exhibition.costumeagency.com/
https://costumeagency.com/
View/ Open
Date
2019Creator
Oyama, Yuka
Keywords
Material culture
wearable adornment
transnationalism
nomadism
identity
participatory performance
jewellery art
memorabilia
Publication type
artistic work
Language
eng