Our second event, Home Cinema: “Home”, will be a 72-hour streaming marathon between the 22nd and the 24th of June 2022. Parallel to our online program, there will be a screening event (location TBC). For our second Open Call for moving image works, Home Cinema is interested in works that re-consider “Home” through a larger theoretical, emotional, physical and virtual infrastructure. We welcome video works with no restriction of format, length, or language. Home Cinema will provide a small screening fee of €50 to the selected artists. Please submit your work via this form before 23.59 h. 1st of June 2022.

“Home”: A conversation with WORKNOT!

Home Cinema was born from a need to define common spaces for moving-image distribution. As visual artists and designers ourselves — working with moving-image and platforms — we ask ourselves how moving-image works respond to our present times through the subjective. We want to sense the urgency and immediacy in regard to the socio-political, technological, and economic context of these works. We started Home Cinema during a global lockdown when the word “Home” gained an even greater significance. “Home” was the only space where we could stream and watch. “Home” was also the word for hosting, sharing, and imagining space, amidst the impossibility of coming together physically. “Home” was not a house, it was a common ground, a platform. This is how the question “What can we see together when we cannot see each other?” motivated our first iteration in 2020.

Since then, our platform has been periodically activated by Open Calls. We believe in Open Calls as spaces for conversation, where many voices can be heard at once. We invite you to participate in this Open Call: Home Cinema x “Home”, motivated by a conversation with WORKNOT!, an independent open collective that works to create a platform dedicated to the representation of the life and work of today’s cognitarians. In their words, “Home” stands for ideas and systems of inhabiting the world. A locus of various dimensions of living practices. A context for bodies. Together we discussed the imaginary of “Home”, departing from the architectural standard of the minimum dwelling, as a preformed habitational solution for workers, already in crisis for a long time. In this sense, The Covid-19 pandemic has acted as a magnifying lens. It brought forward a new reality in which “Home” is no longer where we only rest and recover and where familial bonds are developed, it is now, more than ever, also the space where struggle, success, and failure occur.

“Home” is a preformed, standardized solution for our rest and reproductive needs. Standardization is an attempt to objectify the subjective, an attempt to break the particular. An encapsulation of social constructs, presumptions, and generalizations, as well as exclusions. Production comes with exhaustion. Exhaustion is the path to comfort. Comfort is the goal to be reached by exhausting ourselves through labor. Minimum dwelling, maximum effort. Success and effort are being celebrated, overlooking silence and isolation. “Home” as the space for comfort. What is the role of comfort? Where does it happen? How does comfort define the boundaries of the private and the public? Who has the right to be comforted? “Home” as a compilation of spaces, objects, and memories, where time, ritual, and narrative build attachment. “Home” as a mind space, a landscape. “Home” as a timeless construct, yet increasingly urgent. How is attachment connected to time? How is belonging practiced? How does heritage signal the privilege of having non-disrupted familiar bonds? How do we define “Home” when the privilege of being able to keep, maintain and archive our forms of belonging is absent? “Home” as a space for resistance. A structure of mutual support. “Home” as locations, and not places. “Home” encapsulates fragmented concepts of belonging. “Home” is how we build spaces of support, where belonging matters. The space for rooting in a world of displacement, circulation, and movement. Where hosting is possible. Where we feel, and make others feel “at Home”.