Gathering #1: Home Sweet Home
in-situ exhibition, workshop,
performance, food intervention
Gathering #1: Home Sweet Home was the first edition of The Kinship Cookbook, an ongoing initiative that gathers and shares the forms of kinship growing out of feminine and queer rituals, accumulating over time into a living cookbook that each reader can carry on. Held at SECONDroom in Antwerp, it took the home as its question.
What are the rituals that make us feel at home, and what is a home made of? Is it material or immaterial, a space or a body? A shelter or a sanctuary, something we flee or something we confide in when things are hard? Within Western cultures home and house are bound tightly together: with the enclosure of common land, communal structures gave way to private homes, and that division between public and private came in turn to enclose our relations with others, with nature and with knowledge.
Across an afternoon, eight participants gathered to explore what a home might be and to seek the alternative kinships at its heart, with the first part of the evening given over to people identifying as queer or FLINTA*. Playing with the familiar signifiers of home, the group set out to imagine it otherwise. A collective reading drawn from Mary Douglas and bell hooks, on the home as a kind of space and on the margin as a place of radical openness, opened the ground for new conceptions to surface, and then, working from objects the participants brought and materials prepared beforehand, everyone built a home together.
The evening also served as an early showing of Adriana Joëlle's performance The Linen in Front of My Window. Two performers stood beneath a curtain rod and wore its curtains like dresses, their bodies blending into the fabric until, strand by strand, the lower edge was cut and braided through them. What began as a barrier that hides what lies behind it slowly became a threshold that reveals it, the curtain shedding its function and turning almost ritual, the watching audience standing in for the passage of time.