What are we when we have no home? When there is no shelter from the forces that embody the image of the desert and the storm? The house is where social and personal meanings are projected and negotiated, asymmetric power relations are established, and reciprocity is also found. The home situates the human being, individually and collectively, in the world. From it, roads depart and return; it is the expanded body which, moving through time and among objects, creates the everyday.
Without a home, we are fugitives, endlessly displaced. We are millions.
As a cultural construct, the domestic sphere emerges as the qualitative essence of home—a space meticulously shaped by the intricacies of social life. Behind closed doors, we endeavor to impose order upon chaos, asserting dominion over a personal territory. We domesticate our surroundings through the symbiosis of language and will (Silverstone, 1996). In this act of creation, we fashion material realms in which to dwell and weave intricate networks of affection to sustain our existence. Simultaneously, we engage in the construction of fiction. Fiction, as the boundless capacity to amplify reality's potential, enables the empirical to converge with the imaginary, illuminating the delicate tensions between truth and conjecture within this interplay. It is within this liminal space that the possibility to transform our surroundings resides.
In Domestic Fictions, nine Colombian artists delve into the corporeal experience within habitable space, contemplating the symbolic resonance of objects we guard and perceive as ours. They probe the projection of the familiar into virtual dimensions and, through the medium of painting, unveil an inexhaustible faculty for invention.
