Oykos

Community happens in the overlapping space between people’s circles, and that overlap is home. Home radiates outward: self, room, house, family, friends, language, country, planet. Each circle is a community, and each community is a layer of home. But these circles are no longer nested neatly. Home now stretches across physical and digital spaces at once. Home is no longer a closed unit but a node in networks. What does it mean to be at home today, in a life hyper-mediated by screens, shaped by platforms, stretched across time zones and attention spans?

If home is community, and digital media enables community across distance, then the online itself becomes a site of home-making, a place where people from different geographies can experience belonging together. No one is a self alone on the internet. The networked self is inherently relational. Online, we are always already at home, or always searching for home. Sometimes both at once. Sometimes neither.

Not all technology makes a home. The smart home watches, the platform extracts rent. The shift from the homepage to the platform profile was a shift from ownership to tenancy. The same networks that host community also surveil it, extracting data, attention, and behavior as the price of belonging. The door swings both ways. The question is not whether digital spaces can be home, but whether we build them as homes, as hotels, or as prisons.

And this question extends far beyond the digital. Across the world, home is under attack in the most literal sense through genocide, war, forced displacement, ecocide. When physical homes are demolished, when land is poisoned, when entire communities are erased, the question of home becomes urgent in a different register: it is no longer a philosophical inquiry but a matter of survival. The circles that once radiated outward are shattered.

And it is precisely then that community becomes home more urgently than ever. Because home, or rather homing, is the ongoing, radical act of tending toward each other, the choice to keep building safe space even when no space feels safe, to keep making home out of the people around us, to keep holding each other when everything else falls apart. Home, then, is the stubborn, resilient, daily practice of becoming together.

This, too, is the practice at the heart of the exhibition: a return to the ancient Greek idea of oikos, a concept of home that extends beyond architecture into the intimate territory where identity, memory, care, and belonging are formed. Through installations, images, sounds, sculptures, and gestures, the works examine how artists negotiate belonging and estrangement, protection and exposure, solitude and community. Here artistic practice itself becomes an act of homemaking, a process of constructing temporary spaces of meaning, intimacy, resistance, and care. Home becomes something we create together, again and again.

^{1 Ubuntu is a Southern African philosophical worldview centered on interconnectedness, communal harmony, and shared humanity. The full proverb is umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu: a person is a person through other persons.}
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^References:

^{Boccagni, P. (2022). Homing: A category for research on space appropriation and ‘home-oriented’ mobilities. Mobilities, 17(4), 585–601. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2022.2046977}

^{Kim, H. Y. (2026). We as home: Phenomenological reflections on embodiment, presubjectivity, and the Husserlian homeworld. Continental Philosophy Review, 59, 57–79. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-025-09714-1}

^{Further Readings:}

^{Al Jazar, A. (2022). In search of home: The value of people, belongings, and place [Master’s thesis]. Maastricht Academy of Architecture, Zuyd University of Applied Sciences.}

^{hooks, b. (1990). Homeplace: A site of resistance. In Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics (pp. 41–49). South End Press.}

^{Jackline, A. (2025). The concept of home: Cultural perspectives and personal reflections. Eurasian Experiment Journal of Arts and Management, 7(3), 63–67.}

^{Madianou, M. (2016). Ambient co-presence: Transnational family practices in polymedia environments. Global Networks, 16(2), 183–201. https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12105}

^{Pajnik, M. (2015). Nano-media and connected homeliness. International Journal of Communication, 9, 732–752.}