How do we make ourselves at home in a new country? What do we bring with us or create around us that enables our inner self to react as '''aaaah, now I'm home!'
I'm interested in exploring the built environment as an aid or hindrance to the process of resettlement. What role do the visual and sensory images and objects play in creating a physical and sensorial envionment that facilitates a smooth settlement process, a comforting sinking into soft pillow space we will call 'home'.
In my previous (and mistakenly deleted...oops! techno virgin at fault) blog reader Stan added a comment about the idea of home pages as home bases , staying with you wherever you travel to...people having a cyberspace place to be themselves maybe..
Ailsa added the thought that home is even more non-directional in being an interior place, being 'at home' as sited in one's self; the internal headspace of 'home', and thus inseparable...
A modest brown teddy bear functioned as the sole visual/ sensory image of home in my daughter's life; the only comfort (apart from the parental level) that she seemed to need as we moved around, renting and recreating our new 'homes' wherever we landed...
What can explain an immediate, unexpected and slightly disconcerting sensation of feeling totally and myseteriously at 'home' in a foreign country, a stranger's house, surrounded by a previously unfamiliar, unknown architectural style or design?
What are the physical determinants of 'home' and how do we go about recreating simulacrums in our own new place, our new home and work environments?
This is a start of a personal quest, a searching for paths and answers and new questions about moving, relocating, settling in and settling down... a mixture of personal exploration and hopefully merging with more formal reserach projects...stay tuned.
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About Me
- frangipani
- I'm a NZ based educator, beginning what I hope to be an adventure into the wondrous world of research.
4 comments:
hey - glad you recreated your 'home':) guess the difference between the real built environment and cyberspace is that the physical is not so easily deleted (or maybe that's not true anymore when nuclear warheads can be set off by clicking a button ?. Anyway your thoughts now expanded got me thinking, and I remembered some writings about the 'sense of place' and how these feelings of home are laid down in childhood (this was when I was studying African Literature much of which is a literature of exile, displacement). There is a nice perspective on this by David Orr e.g "Mind and body are imprinted in the most fundamental ways by the "pattern of place" experienced in childhood." Paul Shepard.
welcome back, i had a similar experience when i began :)
Rather than non directional, I said distributed. I have 'home' here- its with husband, child, and this has been the same geographical location for 16 yrs. But home is also NZ. The colours of light, trees, weather, no where far from the see, pretty easy going....
And home was also where i grew up. When I am dreaming 'home' this tends to be the home where i grew up even though i havent lived there for 30 yrs!
What I found funny in a brief foray into second life is the provision of housing (if desired- free home!) But i cant understand why I would need one, no rain to keep off, no inclement weather, dont need to sleep...maybe i just dont get it?
ailsa
In a recent lecture entitled 'The gift of truth', AUT's head of spatial design Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul discusses the Pacific cultural concept of not being alone in your body...Moreover the body functions as an environment melding both time and space where you ancestors also dwell; a kind of multi-habitation, essentially allowing them to making their time-space home in you!
I kind of like this idea of my own body as a home base for my ancestors...! I can already think of a few who might be there/ here..
Schwarzpaul goes on to describe the design processes as a cultural construct in itself (xf. Lacan), where meaning is created through the necessary and unconcious drivers of interactions with others.
And I'm thinking also of the influences those 'many' persons who live and within us may have..
This seems to me also part and parcel of the way we recreate 'homes' in a new environment- the relocated cultural construction which bears influences of past and present lives...
love your photo.
My own body as a space for my ancestors had me recalling how I dreamt of my dad last night. He was redecorating... he had his legs back! (amputated b4 he died a couple of years ago now...
Houses or homes? shaped by the needs of both those in them and those outside of them...
i hadnt considered this ever before, but there is the impact of those on the outside...
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