Teaching

Homescapes - Media Studios Unit 15 at the RCA explored themes of Belonging, Displacement and Home: 'The Migrants Arrived in Pittsburgh’, a painting by Jacob Lawrence and part of his Migration Series, depicts a black family sharing a meal on board a train during the great migration, from North to South America. Such families would share pre-packed meals, as they travelled because segregation laws meant they would not be served during the journey. These culinary events contained, tradition, memory…culture and were a kind of emotional as well as practical sustenance. When communities are forced to move, from place to place how do they manage to take a trace of themselves. Plant new seeds? How does the essence of community survive the violence of rupture? When people move from place to place, how do they recreate a sense of home? At a times of turbulence, transience, and global instability - what are the things that anchor us? As individuals and communities? What fosters a sense of belonging and identity? Homescapes considers the ritualized practices that carry our stories and histories and make places home. We extract from these rituals, gesture, capturing each movement: with cameras, as physical models, drawings, painting. We become at once nomads and archaeologists, navigating the city, simultaneously uncovering and making traces… We will consider how it is we can make homes wherever we go. How home and community transcend material and matter. Home is seen as something which is carried internally, manifesting in memory, externalized through what Anne-Marie Fortier, in Re-Membering Places, embodied movements. For our purposes these could be everyday practices: making food, playing music, dancing…wearing particular clothing; practices and performances by which we inhabit the city and re-create worlds. Once again, we ask: What is it like it to arrive in a new place? How long does it take to belong?