What does ‘HOME’ mean for you?
Project: HOME. Group: Narrator.
For the 2018-2019 MA Collaborative Project with Loughborough University London (LU LDN), we asked students to explore what the concept of ‘home’ means in the lives of diverse people from the university community, using an arts-based digital storytelling approach developed in collaboration with photographer and film maker Tim Wainwright (1954-2018).
With less than 10% of students at LU LDN coming from the UK, it’s a fascinating space that brings together peoples from all over the world with diverse backgrounds and experiences. This is fertile ground for capturing perspectives of the meaning of ‘home’.
Four groups of students were given the same principle guidelines around photography and voice recording, and started reaching out to members of the community – students and faculty and staff. They were supported throughout the project by their tutor, Ece Algan. (In 2021, we will be running the MA Collaboration Project with Ece once again).
The effect of the guidelines is that anyone can use and interpret them and create their own ‘HOMe’ Project - while they will each be unique, they will also still able to work as a set or constellation of projects.
This approach was in part inspired by the work of Dogme 95 - a radical film making movement led by Danish directors, Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, who created the "Dogme 95 Manifesto" and the "Vows of Chastity".
For ethics reasons, students weren’t allowed to take traditional portrait photographs. Fortunately, the guidelines predicted this (or rather that some people just don’t like having their photo taken) and participants could use objects that are meaningful to them in their place.
Each group chose a different focus for their project, looking at what the effects of culture shock, living away from family, coming from different parts of Asia and speaking in different languages, might mean for how participants think about and express what ‘home’ means for them.
Having chosen their focus, our first goal was to help them forget it – at least to begin with – so that it didn’t colour or force their interactions with participants.
The digital storytelling process we’ve developed is, in essence, emergent. One single portrait, while potentially beautiful, is somewhat meaningless. The magic happens when you bring them together side by side and start to see the patterns, the similarities and differences, in what people are sharing. You as the creator go through this process of extracting meaning and so does every person who comes in contact with the work – then you get to talk about what you each found and felt.
The ‘point of it’, so to speak, becomes clear as you move through the process of listening, editing and re-listening to what people have said. Because there are no wrong answers, it’s up to you and the watcher to construct ‘meaning’ from what you’re seeing. This is the ‘art’ aspect, though you can use digital storytelling in far more practical and direct ways too.
The students’ first challenge was to meet and record participants and take their object portraits.
Next, they were challenged to really listen for the essence of what these participants are saying, to edit their contributions down to around 2m 30s each without losing that core meaning, and to compile them into a short film.
The HomeLand group looked at the impact of different languages on the concept of ‘home’ recording participants speaking in 11 different languages.
When the groups returned to their chosen focus, while writing their reports later in the project, some would find that what they created fit neatly with the focus they had initially intended to look at.
For others, the process of creating these digital storytelling pieces would compel them to re-evaluate their preconceptions, desired outcomes and approach.
You can see all four HOME films and read the group reports, here.
The Collaborative project Show at PLEXAL (2019).