From Home to Home

The idea of belonging is a notion that resonates with my sense of identity. I am the child of Sicilian immigrants relocated to the north of Italy in the early 1960s. Rather than merging into something favourable, the inherited richness of these two very different cultures, became an emotional burden effecting my autochthonous identity associated with the Venetian region where I was born. This emotional instability, through the years, led me to move from one place to another in a constant search for a dwelling place that I can call home.

From Home to Home is a project developed in order to merge two practices of great personal importance: Long-distance walking and Art Installation. The research began in 2018 but concretised in 2019, when I began my practice-based PhD at the University of Chichester, although, inevitably, progress has slowed due to the unravelling of the global pandemic. From home to home has become an auto-ethnographical discovery, interlinking two significant locations, bringing them together through the action of walking.

The idea of leaving my everyday home, the home connected to my daily routines, in order to reach the home of my childhood memory and family connections, aims to reconcile my emotional instability, transforming the journey itself into my place of belonging.

The 2000 kilometres of paths, dirt roads, forests, hills, mountains, and urban environments that I cross will, for the three months of the journey, become my home. All my normal social obligations, duties and commitments will dissipate into a perpetual movement following one step after the other.

The project is constituted of two stages.

The first stage will see me walking from my home in Lancing, West Sussex in England, on the 1^st of June 2021 to my family home in Italy, Stra in the province of Venice, arriving around the 31^st of August 2021. I see this peregrination process [1] as an act of endurance bringing me back to my origins. The journey will investigate the impact that walking historical routes has on an individual. I will employ praxis [2] as a methodology to investigate the sympathetic analogy between theory and practice, exploring the subjective consciousness, the phenomenological impact, of the physical and emotional environments encountered across my journey.

The second stage of research will take place once back in England where, the experiences of my journey will be reproposed in the form of Art installation, informed by the action of collection/recollection facilitated by a process of Data ambulation [3]. By prolonging the experiences encountered whilst walking within the gallery environment, this body of work will investigate the potential of endurance walking phenomena to extend beyond the completion of the journey.

The peregrination process becomes a phenomenological propulsor [4], responding directly to the intrinsic properties of long-distance walking, which are subsequently translated into an art installation. The research as a whole explores themes of endurance, flow, embodiment, memory-knowledge and temporality, translational experiences, and the politics of ecological engagement. It deploys philosophical concepts such as Heidegger’s concerns regarding human existence, confronting his observations on the notion of Dasein and death [5] producing a valid analogy between the notion of a journey-of-life and peregrination.

The project can be followed at the recently created website, www.fromhometohome.co.uk, where it is possible to find GPX tracks of the route, detailed maps of the journey alongside updates that will be published daily.

[1] The name given to the long and meandering Journey.

[2] The process of embodying a theoretical understanding.

[3] The process of recording events encountered along the way.

[4] The word encompasses the idea of initiation and consequent push forward, as the major motivator for the development of the art practice.

[5] Heidegger, M., Stambaugh, J. & Schmidt, D. J., 2010. Being and time. Albany: State University of New York Press.