(K)HUONE

Application summary

During the home residency I will explore the CONCEPT OF HOME in social and cultural spectrums of Iran and Finland. Looking deep into my personal family archives, containing more than a thousand negatives taken in Iran and by my grandfather from the 1940s onward, and using the image archives in Finland and comparing through a side by side take. I intend to consider and combine the time and cultural contexts of the archival images and bring them into a contemporary discussion on the concept of home. A notion that has always mattered to everyone. from a normal resident, to an immigrant, to an asylum seeker, and now to all the people of the world in their home quarantines. On 6th August 2011 my grandparents’ house, a home for three generations, located in Rasht, northern city in Iran, burnt in a massive fire which left nothing from it. Later in 2017 when I had already moved to Finland, I learned that my grandfather had found a rotten box with thousands of negatives he took from the 1940s onwards in it, in a corner of that burnt house. Although he wasn’t a photographer, he enthusiastically explored his environment, family and people with his camera. My move to Finland and before that to China, with finding negatives recently, and going through them, triggered me to think deeply about Home and how I perceived it. how the loss of the old house or immigration affected it? What does this universal concept mean in Finland (my new home) and to Finns? How does one like my grandparents think about home after losing everything in their 70s? how would they deal with such a loss? Is resilience a crucial fact? Pondering about the concept of home, using archives, and talking to people (online meeting and friendly chats), I will study how we perceive home as a private personal museum. Is our daily choosing and refusing, keeping and removing, remembering and forgetting considered as an act of archiving?