Organized by Elena Chestnova (USI, Mendrisio/Cité international des Arts, Paris), Elisabeth Petereit (Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris), Céline Trautmann-Waller (Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris)

We often speak of «homes» and «houses». As metaphors, these words describe not so much domestic interiors as spaces offering a sense of dwelling in the world. They aspire to forms of in- and co-habitation that are somehow more satisfactory than the present ones while also being more demanding. They are used as injunctions: to inhabit the Earth without destroying it and to order perceived outsiders to leave. But what is meant in all these cases by «home»? and what does that imply for what we understand as a «house»? What concrete spaces, what forms of social life are signified? What criteria are used for judging, defining and delineating house and home and what representations and imaginaries are implied by them? How do we make sense of the pathos, warmth and normativity of «home» while keeping sight of both solidity and ephemerality of the «house»?

Trying to think about houses historically quickly brings up the subject of domesticity, which denotes a particular way of being at home. «Domesticity» is typically defined as a mode of keeping house that appeared in the bourgeois culture of Europe with the advance of industrialisation, when «workers» - typically men - began to go outside the home, while their family members - typically women - stayed at home taking care of various aspects of maintaining life, now no longer defined as «work». The preserve of domesticity came to be seen as private, warm, sheltering, safe, restful, and female. Everything outside of its confines - as public, dangerous, active, and male. The mobility of the sphere of work and urban exchange rested on the sedentary nature of the domestic interior, ensuring the functioning of the house and family stability. The moveable and the immovable were closely entwined around the home. In a similar way, the notions of settlement and migration were interwoven in the notion of the nation state – a home on a larger scale. We can draw parallels between our understandings of the house and the territory for historical reasons: the ideal of settled domesticity appeared during the period of European imperialism and colonialism, at a time when the modern idea of the nation was also emerging. It is this parallel development that enables us to speak of “home countries”. In the house and in the territory, “home” is a place that encloses and situates, that makes those inside it static and settled, that does not move throughout the year, does not flee, does not migrate.

This schematic domesticity sounds quaint to us today, and indeed scholars now doubt whether it ever existed in the neat and normative way the term suggests. It may have been introduced as a convenient and somewhat wistful way of trying to explain historical development of domestic life and as an injunction by the bourgeoisie – who could afford to live this way – to the working classes, who could not. Yet echoes of the «domesticity» schematic are still present in the way we think of home. The single-family house remains an aspirational norm for many – a private, clearly delineated preserve of women and children – even though realities of people’s lives make this model increasingly untenable. «Home» continues to be a very fixed notion in the Western imagination. Yet this apparent stasis proves paradoxical and elusive: the insistence on stability and settlement that is at the heart of domesticity is premised on the existence of movement, flux, flow, and migration.

This workshop explores the dialectical relationship between domesticity and migration as it was constructed in Europe during the 19th century. It stands the crossroads of the history of architecture, decorative arts and cultural history, and opens the dialogue with researchers from other fields. Interdisciplinary and exploratory, the workshop is addressed to scholars who study the current relationship between migration and domesticity, as well as to exhibition curators and artists who work with these themes. We ask how the dialectic of home and migration developed and how we can study its history.

The workshop focuses on literary texts, visual and material cultures and on theories and practices of architecture, decorative arts and design. We seek to understand the relations of opposition and complementarity that connect the notions of «home», comfort, interiority or domestic space with those of displacement, nomadism, exile and moving, the tension between the configuration of the «fixed» spatial framework (colours, materials, composition) and the arrangement of removable objects, inherited or imported. We ask to what extent did the phenomena of immigration, the development of trade and the circulation of goods, as well as the expansion of colonial empires, influence or stimulate the formation of domestic ideals, in European capitals as well as in distant territories? At what point did the depreciatory visions of nomadic populations, long presumed by theorists and historians to lack a «home» or even architecture, give way to more positive hypotheses, to the point of considering the transportability of the dwelling as a condition of modernity? How is mobility, chosen or endured by people, get accompanied by objects and spatial devices that create refuge and intimacy, evoking home elsewhere?

«Home» can be defined sometimes as a territorial anchorage rooting people in a locality, sometimes as the more or less temporary installation of a set of transportable possessions. The tension between the movable and the immovable home can help us to better understand its history and challenges.