“The house is far away, it is lost, we inhabit it no more, we are alas, certain of inhabiting it never again. It is, however, more than a memory.

It is a house of dreams, our oneiric house”

Gaston Bachelard. La terre et les rêveries du repos.

Dislocation, displacement, and alienation are common experiences for the immigrant. While destabilizing, they offer a chance to retrace one's past: tradition,  experience, and memory. No matter the circumstances of departure from home—whether being an émigré or a refugee, a part of an exodus or a diaspora, or even with privilege—one is still a stranger in a foreign place, or a foreigner in a strange place. At the core of this nomadic/migrant/itinerant and transcultural experience is the idea of home intertwined with the notion of nostalgia. The location of home in time and space—the ‘now/here’ or the ‘then/there’—its expanded or contracted boundaries, and its newly redefined territories meet the impossibility of return.

Nostalgia can be defined as ‘the longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed,’ a sentiment of loss and displacement that awakens the imaginary sickness, a ‘hypochondria of the heart.’ Home is lost, and its loss provokes the painful longing for a homecoming to this first shelter, and inspires a daydreamed reinvention of its intangible architecture.

By using fabric, which is somewhat fragile and easy to model, as well as other materials like paper or beeswax, I wish to suggest that home and its essence are in fact transitory. They can be linked to clothing and essential materials that bare symbolic meaning in our everyday life—belongings that we carry with us and with which we can re-create ourselves somewhere else. In this way the recreation of the home away from home becomes autobiographical, nourished by the experiences of our personal spaces and their associations to childhood, family, our past and present. The process of building home is therefore something personal and ongoing, the construction of an imaginary refuge for our immaterial memories.

The notions of home, identity, and rootedness are unstable, transitory, and changeable. Our desire to guard and carry with us our intimate space, in spite of the physical and mental displacement, gives origin to my work. My sculptures evoke in this way, the idea of home as an infinitely movable imaginary space that becomes intrinsically transportable and translatable. Time, on the other hand, neither expands nor contracts, but stays still in the precision and the carefulness of the needlework, weaving, and construction of my homes.

I wish to address the experience of the immigrant, and to recall the pain of the impossible homecoming through poetic images that arise from the reconstruction of the lost home,  as a promise to rebuild that ideal place that lies within.