HOME IS WHERE ONE STARTS FROM
Selection curated by Francesco Colombelli
The home environment has always been, for many of us, a living space where we can take a break from the outside world. The place that demarcates the division between public and private life: in our homes, we are nothing but ourselves. In 1980, Roland Barthes wrote that ” The ‘private life’ is nothing but that zone of space, of time, where I am not an image, an object”. Security, memory, autonomy, confinement, independence. Political gesture, environment to be built or re built, refuge, place of transit. The home encompasses a multiplicity of terms and meanings that go beyond the idea of physical space, embracing a series of contradictions that find their essence in the relationship between the physical and intimate dimensions of those who live in it.
In the light of this premise, it is undeniable that 2020 has marked a profound change, radically altering the way we live in our domestic space. We have looked at the home in a new way and we have made ourselves look at it differently. Our world has collapsed into a defined number of square meters, and the public image that we have kept separate from our private life at home has burst into our intimate daily lives. We have become images even within the home.
From being a space we thought we knew by heart, our homes have finally become a creative potential to be explored, towards a greater understanding of ourselves and what we are capable of generating as human beings. For many photographers and artists, the home has thus been transformed from a solitary refuge into a stage on which to stage possible worlds: it has been spontaneous to explore the different creative modes that the home itself offers – and, after all, it has also been an intimate and personal exploration. The research is also of interest to those artists who had already realized that there are little worlds to explore in our homes. The focal point is the place we inhabit, which we sometimes call home, a place linked to our past, but which can become a forge for visionary experimentation, for looking at the world with different eyes.
Thanks to:
Eleonora Agostini, Rachel Barker, Stanley/Barker, Carlo Bevilacqua, Lukas Birk, Julia Borissova, Karianne Bueno, Jim Campers, Peter Dekens, Deanna Dikeman, Errata Editions, Rannveig Einarsdòttir, Sébastien Girard, Yann Gross, Dragana Jurisic, Charlotte King, Csilla Klenyanszki, Karen Knorr, Jeffrey Ladd, Tom Licht, Louis Little, Noritaka Minami, Parallelozero, Martin Parr, Nicolas Polli, Zosia Prominska, Giorgia Ravaioli, Fabian Reimann, Ben Roberts, Ann Shelton, Paul Salveson, Max Siedentopf, Jana Sophia Nolle, Studio Sultan Studios, Bert Teunissen
