Drawn to Beauty: The Practice of House-Beautification as Homemaking amongst the Forcibly Displaced

Abstract

Addressing the role that house-beautification plays for individuals coming to terms with the traumas associated with involuntary dislocation, Drawn to Beauty: The Practice of House-Beautification as Homemaking amongst the Forcibly Displaced situates aesthetics as critically important to the emerging interdisciplinary framework articulating the conditions for remaking home in the aftermath of domicide, environmental disaster, and other instances of home’s destruction. Culled from a wide array of sources including personal experience, housing theory, an analysis of third realm beauty, trauma studies and my extensive research-creation practice, this text proposes that attention paid to the daily manipulation of home’s things and objects is a particularly active site for (be)coming home anew.

Key Words:

• Forced displacement
• Third realm beauty
• House-beautification
• Everyday aesthetics
• Homemaking

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Faculty Development Fund of Goddard College; Concordia University’s Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies; and Concordia University’s School of Graduate Studies for the financial support that has allowed me to pursue this cycle of research-creation. I am grateful for the welcome and hospitality extended to me by Keith Jacobs, his family and his colleagues during the Housing Theory Symposium, which was hosted by the Housing and Community Research Unit of Tasmania University in March 2012. This paper is a revised and more articulated version of the paper I presented at the time. The members of my PhD committee, Sandeep Bhagwati, Petra Kuppers and Alice Ming Wai Jim, have generously encouraged me with their constructive feedback. I feel a debt of gratitude to all my close collaborators and participants in the projects associated with this work. Rose Ftaya’s close reading and copyediting suggestions were most helpful. I am also thankful for Jessica Rose Marcotte’s and the two anonymous reviewers’ comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. Some of the live art participants are referred to as collaborators since they were actively involved in shaping the structure and content of the performance events.

2. See for example: Bakewell (2008), Safran (1991), Van Hear (2011) for articulations of categories and classifications of displacement (e.g. refugees, exiles and the homeless).

3. The progress of my critical reflections can be found in Neumark (2010, 2012) and forthcoming.

4. Educator Morwenna Griffiths closely examines the question of “research and the self” and points to many of the problematics associated with subjectivity in research including partiality, generalizability and bias. Addressing each in turn, Griffiths argues that arts-based research is trustworthy and transferable. Moreover, she takes the position “that it is impossible to research any human context disinterestedly”. Griffiths suggests: “Researchers not only take political and ethical stances, but, being human beings, they also inhabit them and are not fully aware of them. Only when political and moral positions are acknowledged or exhibited can strategies be found to enable the outcomes to be judged rigorous or otherwise. Such strategies do not entail that it is better to be an outsider than a participant researcher” (2011, 182). Two key strategies that Griffith suggests are conducive to revealing just how much “all research is affected by the selves (relationships, circumstances, perspectives and reactions) of the researcher” are reflective practice and reflexivity. Roughly, “reflective practice” attaches more to the relational self embedded in time and place, and as becoming what it is not yet. “Reflexivity’ attaches more to the relational, embodied self in a specific social and political context: to his or her individual perspectives and positionality” (184). Griffiths’ theoretical stance is closely aligned with how I have approached this cycle of research-creation from the start. Methodologically, the live art events that I have initiated are both dialogical and iterative. Moreover, by revealing my political and moral positions, I open this work up to both critical engagement and assessment.

5. The two research labs are: Canada Research Chair in Inter-X Art Practice and Theory, Sandeep Bhagwati’s matralab and Canada Research Chair in New Media Arts, Sha Xin Wei’s Topological Media Lab.

6. For a discussion of this idea, see Neumark (2010).

7. First written by Betty Greenberg and Althea Silverman in the late 1930s, this centre stage community ply was scripted to include the stories, songs and food items associated with different Jewish holiday traditions. Greenberg and Silverman’s pageant came at a time when the North American Jewish community was feeling a growing anxiety about anti-Semitism in Europe and concern around Jewish assimilation into the secular culture of the times. For a fuller discussion, see Neumark 2010.

8. Concordia University compliance protocols were followed for all of the live art events and follow-up conversations. All collaborators and participants that are identified within this paper have consented to having their names made public.

9. See also Jacobs, Kemeny, and Manzi (2004), Jacobs and Manzi (2000), as well as Clapham, (2002, 2009) for an overview of social constructionism as it pertains to housing theory.

10. While both in Hebrew and in Yiddish, the word kavana literally means intention; the term is often understood as the kind of mindset and direction of the heart that is to be cultivated in all aspects of mundane and spiritual experience.

11. Another instance of displacement that is bound up with the perception of choice is when the elderly can no longer continue to live in their familial home. I was a team member of a multi-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded project titled Aging in Place (directed by Nancy Guberman). Between 2008 and 2011 – through the use of semi-structured interviews and photo elicitation – we explored seniors’ conceptions and experiences of home as they reached the point of needing to relocate to an assisted living environment. Amongst the most salient findings of this study was the decisive role that (the perception of) choice played in the smooth transition to new living arrangements and the mitigation of social exclusion that had been feared prior to the move by selecting particular objects that held special meaning to be placed in the new housing environment.

12. Literally, The Catastrophe, the Nakba refers to the time marked by forced expulsion, ethnic cleansing and massacres in Palestinian villages and the transfer of British colonial rule in Palestine to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land as Israel became a state.