Belongingness - finding home in the flesh is a participatory project that explores the somatic archives of homecoming, asking whether it's possible to capture the essence of feeling at home through tremors, whispers, and movements. The proposition delves into aspects that often remain undiscovered and therefore unnamed: everyone carries traces of homecoming beyond words and might tap on forgotten sensations worth articulating on a sensorial level. When searching for answers where we belong, we look for people, land, objects – all outside of us. What if we look very near afar from our eyes?
The granted research period provides a foundation for an artistic process that encompasses conversations with individuals of eclectic migrant backgrounds and creative thinkers-makers, engaging with texts, interweaving experiments, and thinking in writing. The aim is to create a framework where participants can hold space for introspection and delicacy. It is not an abstraction about home – belonging – migration - identities, but rather it invites to dwell in the body as the primary site of knowing.
Belongingness engages with what Svetlana Boym calls "reflective nostalgia" – the universal longing that searches in details and transitions. Boym emphasizes the longing aspect of the word belonging; focusing on the second becomes possessive towards a place and nationality, while the first points out to a different time, and a common universal human need allowing empathy and connection to flourish.
I carry more than I know
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I know more than I can tell
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I carry more than I know >>> I know more than I can tell >>>
My motivation is my own search, as an "eternal migrant" - a granddaughter of four people who crossed the globe, and myself who relocated twice in my gelukszoeker quest. This research time will grant the possibility to engage with urgent questions in contemporary times by accessing dimensions of experience that often remain undiscovered and therefore unexpressed. It allows us to meet the “other” through an affective and relational prism. The universal longing for belonging gains a safe space to be felt rather than merely discussed: it requires courage to be “speechless” and suspend judgment. In our era of digital distance, embodied connections prove both deeply rewarding and essentially needed.
This process builds towards the development of what could be called a performance - where those who “perform” and “perceive” are the same group of people; they jointly witness the amalgam of their own experiences and impacts. How the mechanism will function, is something to be discovered. The collaborative approach of meaning making (or having a sense together) cannot be reproduced, as each instance remains singular. It is an encounter of sensibilities, where everyone owns their own point of view. Participation is a creative endeavor which prioritizes unfinished thoughts, with an associative nature. A space for rawness and immediacy.
From February 2026 and on, several open sessions as research will be offered in Rotterdam in collaboration with organizations that resonate with the topic and have the openness to facilitate the space: Verhalenhuis Belvédère, Dokhuis and TENT Rotterdam.
Funded by Cultuurfonds & VoordeKunst under Development for Individual Makers scheme.
I have invited Liesbet Hermans to be my witness in the process and dialogue partner.
