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How is the reconstruction of home encoded in objects of domesticity?

Abstract

Home is never only a house. It is a landscape of nostalgia, a constantly evolving universe that holds memory, longing, and identity together, even as it remains fleeting, incomplete, and ever-evolving. It is the anchor that holds people together, whether it be a child or a nation; without it, humans lose all sense of orientation. Yet in all of its importance, the definition of home is unfixed, unbound, and dispersed, as a space that is untied to any specific geography or location. It is a practice, a lifelong process of homing, in which people negotiate belonging and selfhood through memory, imagination, and the material culture that surrounds them. Domestic objects—furniture, photographs, mementos, media—emerge as the tools for the phenomenological experience of home, the ones that remind us of a time, of a smell, or a face. They are repositories of personal and collective memory, material embodiments of longings, and markers of identity. As mundane as they are, they anchor the feeling of home and mediate the relationship between ‘here’ and ‘there,’ or between ‘now’ and ‘then,’ or even between ‘me’ and ‘them.’

How can objects be responsible, active agents in social spaces of meaning production? Diasporic homes and exhibitions can both be characterized as opposite ends of the same domesticity spectrum. Where the diasporic home is overloaded with questions, lived meanings, and embodied knowledge, the exhibition space is as blank and devoid of meaning as can be. What is then reconstructed inside the exhibition becomes a critical tool for examining how artists and the public occupy the same space. One imbues it with representational symbols, aspiring to narrate a story; the other enters blindly into a space and is met with a plethora of signs. The exhibition space becomes a space of meaning production and negotiation, wherein both actors operate based on their own internal worlds; however, their overlap is made possible by their imaginative capabilities to transport themselves into other universes.

The aim of this body of research is to investigate the ways in which domestic objects reconstruct home, particularly in diasporic contexts, and how these reconstructions are performed and experienced within exhibitions. A comparative methodology examines two distinct exhibitions in order to illuminate the spectrum of domestic representation. Inge Daniels’ At Home in Japan creates an immersive, mimetic reconstruction of Japanese domesticity, where visitors encounter everyday life through touch, sight, and spatial engagement. In contrast, Hannah Darabi’s Soleil of Persian Square operates through mnemonic and affective strategies, using photographs, music, and media to evoke Iranian diasporic memory. Questions of authenticity, relatability, and affective resonance arise from both cases, but they both foreground the same idea: objects are not passive. They carry agency and memory and have the power to transform and inflict particular experiences; what those experiences will be then depends on the internal universe of the viewer. By studying the domestic object in the exhibition, this study will reveal how domestic objects transform abstract internalized notions of home into tangible, shared, and deeply human experiences.

Various theories and philosophies explain the surreal and existential questions regarding how humans make meaning in life. This paper concerns itself with the idea that imagination, which is the creative faculty of the mind, is the most powerful tool at the disposal of humankind to make any meaning of anything whatsoever. As a force of psychic production, imagination is what allows for the attachment to inanimate, functional artefacts, onto which we project all sorts of meanings and aspirations. This affectivity within object-person transactions is the internal commitment to the pleasure of personal imagination. Human transcendence—the ability to experience the world beyond the reductionism of utilitarianism—is precisely due to the faculty of imagination. 

When you look at an object, what do you see? How do you feel? Is it yours? Maybe it belongs to your parents. Or your grandparents. Does it belong to someone you know? Are they a stranger to you? Do you know what you are looking for?

Introduction

Outside of its box of four walls, home is the cosmos of every human being: ephemeral, temporary, and always in progress. It remains the universe a person knows that makes them whole and incomplete at the same time. The slightest disruption to our first understanding of home as it is known to us—home as the feeling, concept, or idea, in its phenomenological state that may be physical or merely a memory—sends us onto a lifelong search for home. 

In this lifetime of post-identity shaped by global mobility and digital circulation, home as a concept of belonging and memory is now less than ever tied to permanence or geography. Its simultaneous materiality and immateriality are at the core of the research conducted behind this paper, which asks: how is the reconstruction of home encoded in objects of domesticity? Material culture is constituted of signs and symbols that are collected and cultivated throughout a lifetime, so much so that simply studying the objects a person cherishes and surrounds themselves with reveals much about them. Beyond signalling taste and status, these objects indicate spatial and temporal continuity and contradictions across geographic and generational boundaries. Domestic objects become material manifestations of aspirations, longings, and biographies of lives that have been and are being lived.

Aiming to reconcile identity, domesticity and representation, this paper isolates specific parameters of anthropological studies on the reconstruction of home. It looks at the ways in which diasporic people negotiate past and present identities through objects, serving as a sample population exemplifying the search for a memory of home, within the context of exhibitions. Therefore, this study concerns itself with two central notions: diasporic domesticity and exhibition spaces as critical tools for representation. Diasporas, deemed as some of the most relevant social formations, deeply animate an understanding of how people “view, articulate and aestheticize [themselves] and the contemporary world.”2 The condition of in-betweeness which dictates the diasporic state—a state of exile being the “process of perpetual becoming, involving separation from home, a period of liminality and in-between” —defines much of the ways through which diasporic people accumulate and organize domestic objects. Just as people move, objects travel across time, space and different social spheres of representation. Items acquire the capability of accumulating histories, just as people do, hence the notion of object biographies “as a means to understand the agency of objects that moved through space and time.” 4 Considering that transformations of person and object are tied up together, objects are no longer mere passive artifacts or illustrations. Storytelling, imagination and interpretation imbue domestic objects with

agency, history and life, revealing different productions of meaning by diasporic communities. The stories that can be drawn through studying domestic objects at the core of collective diasporic memory and post-memorial remediations are what motivated this research’s use of exhibitions as a tool of anthropological study of domestic objects. Beyond their representational role, exhibitions entail an actual reconstruction by the artist—display of objects, curated media, intended experience—of whatever it is they are representing. Initially blank canvases at the disposal of artists, curators and storytellers, the exhibition space transforms into a social space mediating meanings, confronting artist, object and spectator in real time. Compared to other forms of art and cultural productions, exhibition spaces become responsible for making up the scenes of understanding humanity through material culture.

This research examines two diverging forms of curatorial representation and self-representation are in question among the case studies within this research. Following a theorization of the practice of home and of exhibitions as practice of research, a comparative discussion regarding the two cases of exhibited domesticities will reveal empirical insights into the ‘home in the exhibition’. First, an ethnographic research conducted by Inge Daniel through an immersive reconstruction of Japanese domesticity in a London museum, At Home in Japan, will be evaluated. Mimetic in character, the case of this exhibition explores how visitors confront the ordinariness of Japanese everyday and domesticity, underscoring tensions between lived and representational experiences. Second, a mnemonic exhibition curated by Hannah Darabi, Soleil of Persian Square, recalls Iranian diasporic domesticity via visual and sensory representations, tapping into affective authenticity and nostalgia. Its evocative nature capture a sense of collective nostalgia and questions the discontinuities within diasporic identities through imagery of domestic objects, rather than an objective representation merely consisting of literal preservations of home. 

In the practices of reconstructing home as a sanctuary of memory and nostalgia, objects appear as manifestations of the self within the domestic sphere encoded with meaning and habit, serving as representations of negotiated identities and histories. By curating them into exhibitions, these domestic objects foreground the tensions between lived memories and displayed narratives of home. Thus, in this study, the exhibition emerges as a critical tool for the anthropological research on representations of identities and on the curation of domesticity in the case of the diaspora, as it proves itself a platform where the displayed object expresses itself as much, if not more, than a person themself.