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Guest studio 1: Lou Galopa

Lou Galopa, staying with us this month, is working on her installation in Quartair:
'...Every day I'll make the house of the day with objets I found in the street. Each small scupture is combined with a drawing.
I have a lot of houses (I travelled a lot) but I'm looking for my home. I feel at home only in the water. So I imagine for the installation a waterhouse. It's now in progress....'


The exhibition Calling Home aims to put emphasis on the concept of home and to discuss its different representations. Although home is represented and referred to in diverse ways in different times, cultures and regions, in the end it is a universal concept. We all come from somewhere, although this place usually considered as home might never have existed as a "real", physical place or might only be captured in past tense. Home is not a building but it can be built in mind.

Home is an important constructor of identity. The American sociologist Kath Woodward has once said that "identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis". When the stability, continuity and safety of home is for some reason questioned, threatened or totally lost also identity becomes an issue. Feelings of alienation and dis/misplacement might be caused by being in one place but longing for another, sensing home in different environments or in no place at all. Still, alienation does not solely come out from being abroad from home, physically far from the place of origin, but might as well result from several problems of identification and feelings of exclusion within a certain social or cultural group.

Riitta Granfelt, Finnish researcher in social sciences has defined the meaning of home in three levels: home is a platform for close relationships, a representation of continuity and it is connected with mind and memories. Within Calling Home I wish to put attention on works that discuss, represent, reflect on, challenge or question different concepts of home.