Is the idea of home a constructed one? Can our idea of it ever change?
Where do we notice the symbols of home every day?
Is home a physical location or an abstracted imagination?
Is it our birthplace, or is it where life is accelerating for us?
Home is the recognition of a familiar past, re-lived through objects or certain indicators that come across our way. Home is the fantasy of my childhood: memories of acute detail and childhood haziness coming into foreground when my senses make reference to a past partially constructed through my own imagination. However, memories become so abstracted with time that there is a need to concretize the symbols of past experiences, of a home. I have been photographing artifacts, textures and architectural constructions in a quotidian manner, in order to catalog references to childhood haze. These signifiers have been spread between a few parts of Bangladesh, Toronto and Montreal. I’ve realized that architectural expressions can have fleeting emotions, intensity and memories encoded in them. The material sensibility of structures are the placeholders for these emotional intensities. What allows me to identify my home is by making material connections between the past and present. This act of material connection of several locations has crept into how I accept my current geographic place, and more significantly, what constitutes my home. Just when do we start to discover and embrace new signifiers of a home? Can the idea of home exist as just the organization of certain symbols and abilities, detached from physical location or is home the physical environment where our early memories have been formed and we search for those early memories in an effort to pacify the jaded realities of our present? It boils down to recalling and nostalgia; a place of safety rooting from these indicators.
