As Close As I Get
For the second in the 'Home of Your Own 'series of installations, which is part of the 'Temporary House of Home' exhibition, Francisca Khamis Giacoman presents 'As Close As I Get.' Through regular ongoing performances or 'activations' during the exhibition period, she will continue to develop the work. Materiality, ephemerality and access play a central part in her practice and relationship with home. 'As Close As I Get' will be open from 16 September to 7 November, with performances on 18 September and 16 and 30 October.
18 September 2021 12:00 - 15:00
A home of one's own in Temporary House of Home
Because of social distancing, a generation of designers has graduated virtually unseen. What's more, in the months leading up to graduation their education was largely in front of the computer screen, in often complicated domestic circumstances. How has this experience shaped their understanding of the home, and how does it relate to their own practice? In a series of bi-monthly installations, representatives of this generation present their own highly personal views of home.
Francisca Khamis Giacoman
For the second in the series Home of Your Own, part of the _Temporary House of Hom_e exhibition, Francisca Khamis Giacoman presents As Close As I Get, a follow up to her Sandberg Institute graduation work.
Coming from the Palestinian diaspora in Chile, Khamis Giacoman explores memories as traces of silenced narratives. She records and reconstructs stories of a home that lives on as a ghost in her family's oral tradition. As Close As I Get documents a failed visit to the house, still standing in Al-Makhrour in Palestine, but inaccessible to her family. A video merges Khamis Giacoman's own journey to the house with the memories recalled by her great-aunt Labibe. To regain access and keep the memory of the house alive, Khamis Giacoman traces its floorplan in a series of performances or activations. A set of steps reconstructs a part of the house and invites the visitor to rest.
Temporary House of Home
With a multifaceted Temporary House of Home, from July 2021 Het Nieuwe Instituut will explore how our thinking about domestic interiors and design has evolved over the past decades.
Because each room offers its own perspective, the house forms a spatial collage of possible interpretations of what a home can be - from safe haven to home workplace, from financial investment to haunted house, and from site of seduction to a means of control or punishment. Different perspectives on the role and functioning of the interior are set against design history and past and contemporary examples. The Temporary House of Home also offers various answers to the question of what "design" entails beyond the furniture and interior objects with which it is usually associated.