The Meaning of Home was conceived as a group exhibition that would have been one result of a week-long workshop with students from Birzeit University in Palestine, Sint Lucas School of Arts in Antwerp, and Dutch Scholars. Online exchanges over the past months had planted the seeds of a collective process, a collaboration that was about to come to fruition. Flights were booked, visas arranged, suitcases nearly packed.

Then, as if awaking to a half-remembered dream, recurring and all-too real, the sky filled with missiles and drones, blotting out the light, only the glowing after-image of a bright white shadow where the sun had been; the US and Israel had waged war on Iran. All flights were cancelled. The workshop was called off. The collaboration cut short.

The students from Birzeit are confined to their homes, our newly-built exhibition window sat empty, filled only with this absence, this longing, and the demand to think anew the terms of collective imagination and action.

Exhibition Street Gallery

Our newly-built exhibition window sat empty, then, filled only with this absence, this longing, and the demand to think anew the terms of collective imagination and action. The Absence of the Meaning of Home gathers the traces of this forestalled encounter: fragments, drafts, gestures of care, embroidered gauze, postcards sent from a distance widened by geopolitical violence.

The notion of home typically refers to a place, the original “thereness” of one’s belonging: to a landscape, to a people, a language. It also refers to a temporality: to the prospect of return. These two narratives of home—place of origin and prospect of return—are unsettled by diaspora: What if you cannot go back? What if the place no longer exists?

Did it ever exist to begin with? Forced displacement reminds us that home was always a narrative, and it can be rewritten. Das Unheimliche is usually translated as “uncanny,” but literally means unhomely, or unhomed: that which unsettles the taken-for-grantedness of “home,” its familiarity and self-evidence. The intrusion of absence due to geopolitical violence reveals that nothing is self-evident about home.

Home is inherently unhomely, a constantly moving and shifting assemblage of needs, habits, passions and affects we invest into a place to create that life-world, that comfort we call home. As long as war and genocide persist, home can be nothing other than this desire, this state of longing: for connection, for justice, for peace.

Poetry reading with Fasila Collective

Saturday 28 March Fasila Collective (@fasila.collective) hosted a public reading in our studio. Together, we explored absence, home, and the shifting meanings of belonging under conditions of forced displacement and exile. What unfolded was not only a reading, but a shared space of listening, reflection, and collective relieving.

From different geographies and experiences, voices came together — carrying fragments of memory, loss, and imagination — reminding us that home is not fixed, but continuously negotiated.

Opening Street Gallery

Saturday 28 March we opened our first exhibition ‘The absence of the meaning of home’ with workds from students of the Birzeit University in Palestine, Sint Lucas School of arts (Socio-political masters context) and Dutch scholars. From now on, every season we will curate a new presentation that amplifies Palestinian voices, design and resistance.

The gallery is made possible with the support of Recyclart Brussels and Brave New Works Amsterdam. The construction is designed by Moayad Najjar, produced by Sarah Mutuena and installed and curated by Luke Shirock.

• Artists and designers: Ibtisam Abukaff, Majd Abumadi, Rahaf Mansour, Demetra Cuschera, Sasha Anguelovskaia, Freja Nøhr Kristiansen, Eleni Ploumi, Lisa Bakker, Omar Abhar, Aya Alahmad, Batool Muadi, Malak Zahran, Shahd Faraj, Samra Roseboom, Melania Trejo Mendez, Elham Ahmadi, Eline Antonine Zeevat, Vladimir Babinchuk, Jawa Refai, Leen Foqaha, Raghad Suleiman, Aez Pinay, Berke Eren Gün, Anna Banout, Fareed Fareed, Lizzie Breen
• Fascilitators: Mercedes Azpilicueta (Rietveld Academie), Rasha Dakkak (Rietveld Academie), Yasid El Rifai (Birzeit University), Anik Fournier (If I Can’t Dance), Sara Giannini (If I Can’t Dance), Ibrahim Muhtadi (Disarming Design from Palestine), Luke Shirock (Disarming Design from Palestine), Dennis Sobeh (Birzeit University), Dima Yaser (Birzeit University), Annelys de Vet (Sint Lucas School of Arts), Antoinette Vonder Muehll, and acknowledgements to Kurt Vanbelleghem
• Disarming Design: Ibrahim Muhtadi, Moayad Najjar, Annelys de Vet, Luke Shirock, Lydia Tekatoglu