When they went home,

“As if in the spring time,
Each of them were sobbing in a certain tune.”

Weqtê weku cûne ser malê

“Goya ku di feslê nûbiharì 

Her yek bi meqameki dikalìn”

A house!

I told her the house we are building was for me just this repetition of going there, working on the same wall endlessly. It was poetic for me. The migratory, diasporic struggles are in it, in the centre of it to be honest. I don’t want to point towards them, mention it too often. So I kept close to the shared things with her, and close to my own memories, and family histories, how they shape and reshape some paths I am following.

I can understand that it is sort of about migration, but it is not about ‘migration’. 

Like in the video, the text she wrote is also quite intimate; you can read it as a

love letter.

In my longterm project Our house is only half finished, I built a house for myself. In parts. Each part is somewhere else. Scattered, like my own body and mind, I build, break and rebuild a house. With just enough soil, sand, stones and water to build only a small part, each time I lay the stones for the next room, the next wall, I have to tear down what was already there. A continuous crumbling and disappearing, remaining unfinished, yet opening space for other homes to be built.  By looking closely at the process of building homes, I try to get glimpses of the ways in which migration and movement can form experiences, and spaces of belonging. Through this I invite conversation on diasporic and migratory struggles that come with finding oneself a home.

In the early 2000s, my brother, following in my father’s footsteps, started working in construction as an ijzervlechter (steelworker). As a part of and in contrast to our house
is only half finished, while continuing to build different parts of the house, I am researching Kurdish migrants in The Hague working in construction as steelworkers. How they repeatedly do the same work, the steel parts, and move on to the next building. I am especially in close collaboration with my brother; He films himself while at work. 

These video diaries are parallel to how I document myself while building parts of the house at different sites. Besides the videos, he also shares leftover materials from a day of work. The idea is to include them in my artistic practice, to realize a material- and image-based conversation (that goes way back to our shared memories).

What exactly is happening when I build a house in parts, when the steelworker walks from one construction area to another? What does this circulation mean? In present-time, anxiety and fear can be a daily reality for the other, the migrant. The work, focusing on the space of belonging, carries the memories, the entanglements of the migratory movement, land, bodies, and sleeping—walking—building that are familiar to me, in their utmost friability. They are extensions of home transcending the chronological time. The house itself isn’t automatically home; it’s the aura that surrounds us, the landscape that we carry with us, within us, that gives it its meaning. The place where we can gather ourselves, then, can be anywhere. 

Returning to one’s homeplace and walking away from home can mean the same if we find the right tone, texture

It was around 1971, 1972 that the last people permanently left. Some people kept the olive trees, keeping a little connection, but they were not sleeping in the place. So they would come from time to time to do some maintenance. But eventually these people got older and older. They stopped coming.

If you don’t use the trails they get full of bushes. Then it’s harder to get to the house. So everything gets worse. And the roofs of these houses are always the bigger problem. If the wall is well made it can last many decades abandoned, but the roofs, if you have a tiny leak, there is water entering the wood, it will rot. Like in five, six, ten years top it’s on the ground. And if people still inhabited them, they would immediately fix it.