Since June last year when I set up my planning space at S1 Artspace and planned my house while talking to people about their experiences related to home and house http://www.silvia-champion.co.uk/doku.php?id=a_little_bit_of_austria_phase_ii:start, I’ve been doing work that relates to ‘My Little Bit Of Austria’. Examples for this are ‘Home’ http://www.silvia-champion.co.uk/doku.php?id=home:start and ‘What Makes A Foreigner Sound Foreign’ http://www.silvia-champion.co.uk/doku.php?id=what_makes_a_foreigner_sound_foreign:start. Language, home, belonging and place have been three very influencial words in my research.
What is the connection between ‘home’ and ‘language’? Can language be home? For some people a specific language is their home. I feel by switching from one language to another I switch from one country to another. I am asking myself what ‘home’ are we creating when switching fluently between English and German with some less frequent periods of Spanish and French. All this is part of our histories and homes where you can sense a passage of time feel like real homes to me. When I asked people to share their thoughts on what ‘home’ means to them I got a wide variety of responses, some of them very moving as not every home is a good home.
While I prepare for my solo show ‘Home’ at the Red Gallery/Hull I’m reading around a variety of topics that form part of the notion of home and language being a very central one.
