ALWAYS COMING HOME DEBATE ABOUT HOMES AND ECOLOGY IN ART by Kim Simonsen 1

ALWAYS COMING HOME

Literature, art, performance and talks

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands. (…)
Walk carefully, well-loved one,
Walk mindfully,
well-loved one,
Walk fearlessly,
well-loved one.
Return with us,
return to us,
Be always coming home.

Ursula K. Le Guin fra Always Coming Home, 1985

Always Coming Home is a literature and art even rethinking what ideas of home might come to mean today. Inspired by the writings of American science fiction writer Ursula K. le Guin, we will venture into hopeful speculation on alternative homebuilding.

The word ‘ecology’ has its etymological roots in the Greek word ‘oikos’, meaning home. Contemporary ecological philosophies have introduced the word ‘solastalgia’, referring to feeling deprived of a home without having migrated. In a time, where all beings must see themselves and their futures enrolled in the consequences of environmental breakdown, the question of home takes on new urgency: Whom is afforded the privilege of being able to come home, and who is not? What kind of homes and homemaking technologies may we develop in order to respond to the increasing state of migration and homelessness on a wrecked planet?

Homes are, perhaps, stranger than we know. Homes host worlds that include forms of life both intimate and alien to us; plants, bacteria, animals. Even our bodies, our most primal homes, consist of DNA of microbiomes that do not belong to ‘us’ . In us, already, otherness resides.

Always Coming Home will unfold as a couple of hours of talks, readings and screenings.

Always Coming Home is a part of a larger literary and art event arranged by the Publisher Eksil and the Laboratory for Aestethics and Ecology (Dk/DE)
Link: http://www.labae.org/publications/sound-of-mull
Link: https://gfestival.fo/news/446