Homecoming is a deconstructed ethnography of a past, present, and future colliding within my home space and body.  My goal with this project is to engage with the tensions present in domestic spaces in regards to the public/private binary, temporality, and the roles that spaces play in our becomings.  The project draws aesthetic and stylistic influence from social media sites such as Instagram and Pintrest, creative non-fiction and memoir, and ethnographic field notes.  Homecoming is reminiscent of a shoe box filled with moments and memories that is not arranged in any particular order and forces the finder to make connections between the contents.  The snapshots of a fluid temporal moment captured here are at the same time intimate and raw, yet highly filtered (both literally and figuratively) for public viewing.  It seeks to speak to the public affective nature of home and becomings through an engagement with a localized and contextual intimate, private space.            

Kathleen Stewart offers ordinary affects as a means of accessing the mundane and everyday and its relation to a larger and collective experience.   Stewart defines ordinary affects as, “public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they’re also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of” (p. 2).  Ordinary affects are what gives everyday life its sense of connectedness and motion.  Ordinary affects become textured and mobile as they make contact with bodies and the social, they are “what makes thoughts and feelings possible” (Stewart, p. 3).  Affect is what renders bodies as belonging or non-belonging in a world (Siegorth & Gregg).  It is through the circulating and public textures and modes of being the intimate body becomes knowable in the public and how the public can take up residence within the private home spaces that is the stuff of everyday. 

Sara Ahmed argues that spaces and the bodies that inhabit them have fluid boundaries, spaces do not start where bodies end and bodies do not exist separately from the spaces they are oriented within.  Instead, “spaces are like a second skin that unfolds into the folds of the body” (Ahmed, p. 7).  Home spaces are not just spaces where bodies reside, but are the spaces where intimate moments of identity work happen and bodies are constructed.  It is often within the space of home that we prepare ourselves for public interactions and where we come to know ourselves.  This isn’t to say that home spaces exist in a public/private binary, but rather than the quasi private nature of home spaces provides opportunities that more explicitly public spaces do not.  Ahmed also speaks about bodies that become queered or disoriented within normative spaces need to find ways or being re-oriented, of find safe spaces of being in the world.  For me, this space of comfort and re-orientation is the home space.  While I do not find a complete reprise from hegemonic and normative expectations and desires it is within the spaces of home that I fell most at ease.  The contradictions that make themselves known within and resonate off bodies that inhabit home spaces render homes as “already rather queer spaces” (Ahmed, p. 9).  The intimacies and desires that stick to home spaces are fractured and fluid, it is the private and intimate nature of these objects that connects the intimate to the public.

My project draws heavily on these understanding of spaces, bodies, public, private, belongingness, becoming, and how these converge and mingle in a tangle that contributes to our understandings of our place in the world.  I draw heavily from arts based research practices including photography and creative non-fiction,  interactive documentary and sensory ethnography as a means of accessing and exploring the everydayness and the constitution of my body, identity, and the public and intimate spaces.    

I have chosen to document the ordinary affects and everydayness of my home in  ways that distances myself from my own subjecthood.  These methods include reflecting on experiences and narratives in a vague third person voice, documenting the space and objects that inhabit the space in stylized photos reminiscent of social media images using a camera phone, and taking on the role of an ethnographic researcher entering the space creating field notes and conducting interviews with myself. 

The final product is a careful curation of an archive of my everydayness that documents my own intimate and simultaneously public contact and negotiations with adulthood, making space for myself, the acceptance and rejection of what constitutes home, and being at home both in in a space and body.