There’s something about home – its smell maybe, or the way it carries us from place to place. The objects we gather in boxes when moving houses, or the empty spaces we settle into with nothing but a backpack and our guitar. Home is the languages we master, the olive stews we eat, the birthdays we witness, the memories we make. Sometimes home is everywhere, and sometimes it’s nowhere at all.

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Home(less)ness: Geographies of Identity is a compilation of a range of voices, both near and far, speaking to notions of home, identity, and otherness, to mention just a few. They are topics we began to contemplate more actively after moving to a new country – in our case, Israel. Israel, in particular, is a place where the topic of land has been disputed since its inception in 1948. Its existence as a Jewish state has rendered it a homeland to many, while preventing others from settling or seeking refuge. Home, accordingly, is a concept that is elusive, multi-interpretable, and dependent on one’s own history and sense of place.

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Here, we alongside our contributors seek to raise questions around the physicality and transcendent quality of home. The included pieces present intimate portraits of life in Israel and beyond, which we hope you will find amusing, thought provoking, raw, and relatable. We further hope to make you think for a moment, when turning your house key in its lock tonight, about the value of belonging and the complex nature of home.

 

 Luna Goldberg & Anne van den Bergh

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This limited edition artist book was published in Tel Aviv, Israel in May 2016.