The relationship we have with the house and home is twofold. We create and inhabit houses as the most intimate living and private spaces, nurturing them with habits and everyday life rituals, appropriating them with objects, symbols, and memories. All of these elements come together to evoke a sense of home. However, the file and the associated art-film project I am presenting here will focus on the second facet of the house – the way the house communicates with us, influencing and shaping our desires and feelings of belonging or dependency.
Houses are much more than passive shelters and containers that we adapt and reinvent throughout history to fulfill our needs for environmental protection and social bonds. A house exists not only as a physical object in a specific space-time but also as a desired destination to aspire to in the future or return to in the past. The energy of a house arises from the tension between the desired and the possible, giving rise to unique entities of house and home – powerful, demanding, unexpected, yet also life-giving and restful.
Constructing, renovating, and inhabiting are processes during which we encounter the house as a living character face-to-face. This encounter begins with the realization that these are not merely given and provisional spaces but carefully thought-out and constructed formations that synthesize cultural, biological, and psychological aspects of our needs, desires, and expectations towards nature, our surroundings, and our way of life in general. We enter an intensive period of organization, problem-solving, budget issues, logistics, and communication. Soon after, a compelling drive emerges to understand the meaning behind the process – its generational cyclicity, family relations, necessity, logic, and responsibility.
Following this, we finally make the encounter, akin to suddenly discovering our phantom limb – an exoskeleton – but not being sure which came first, the house, the home, or us. It is precisely within this immediate and somewhat disturbing encounter that I will focus on constructing the film narrative and related artistic activities.
Traditionally, architecture, archaeology, and anthropology have focused on the house and home as their primary subjects. Over time, these disciplines have evolved in the way they approach the house and home, considering them as subjects of construction, ritual spaces, everyday life shelters, or comfort zones. In the second half of the 20th century, scholars such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Bourdieu began questioning the house's power to generate specific social and cultural behaviors. More recently, the "home experience" has become a subject of cultural studies and autoethnography, contributing to research on class, gender, and psychosociology. On the other side, literature and film have produced numerous works that explore situations where houses and homes reveal their phantomic presence and materialize their influence on personal and collective histories, spanning from Homer's "Odyssey" to Ivan Goncharov's "Oblomov" and Gilles Clement's "Le salon des berces," or Mona Chollet's "Chez moi."
My own artistic research on this theme began in 2010 when I documented the phenomenon of unfinished family houses of large dimensions, massively present and scattered across the Balkans. I was intrigued by how such houses impose specific relations among family members, shaping their experiences of time, desire, and expectations toward home. The primary question that intrigued me was: why are these houses there, transforming homes into permanent construction sites, waiting for upcoming generations to grow up and move into yet unfinished floors? Some of the results materialized in the form of illustrations, photos, and objects. Personally, having grown up in such a house, I can recall at least three other strong immediate encounters with home and house. The first occurred during a city bombing, seeking shelter and living inside a home with no electricity, heating, and hot water for over three years. The second was being in lockdown during the coronavirus crisis, as experienced by most of the world. The most recent encounter involved entering a DIY house renovation project due to a lack of finances to hire a professional contractor, unintentionally returning to the roots of my grandparents, who were house builders themselves.
All of these explorations culminated in a period of intense reflection on the experience. This involved delving into family archives, conducting interviews with elderly family members, documenting the renovation process, and researching phenomena and works of art aligned with the topic.
Mladen Bundalo
Brussels, 2022