Laura Bivolaru: All We Have of the House

As I rest my head on the cool pillow at night and close my eyes, my body enters a frail state of suspension; from this point on, I can either fall asleep or come back to awareness. Often at this time a question takes shape out of nowhere – where am I right now? Lying horizontally in the disorienting darkness, my proprioception numbed by the promise of slumber, I browse familiar locations in my mind and I soon panic. I see myself in my Tooting Bec bedroom, my head pointing south. Yet that feels alarmingly wrong - I moved to North London two years ago. Perhaps, then, I’m on the soft mattress in Turnpike Lane, where the floor creaks under the tall bed. That doesn’t feel right still. It takes a while to fully reconstruct in my mind the picture of my current bedroom and the floor plan of my flat; it’s a drag to remember everything without mixing things up. Here my head points to the west, the bed is low, the mattress firm, the air cool, and light comes in through the Venetian blinds. Yes, my body agrees that this is indeed where I am, but I don’t feel comforted by this eventual resolution. It shouldn’t be so strenuous to remember where home is.

Before moving to the UK in 2013, I had lived in the same flat with my parents in Romania for twenty-one years. Since then, however, I’ve moved home seven times. We often think of ghosts as apparitions of people who passed away but haven’t moved on, yet I don’t think I’m wrong to believe that places can haunt us in equal measure.

I carry landscapes that leave traces. I am made of landscapes with lines that leave traces.

The films in the section All We Have of the House speak of haunting and fragmentation. Families are separated in space and time, or inhabitants are removed from their homes and homeland by a variety of historical vicissitudes. Individual lives appear as soft and malleable as images in the face of war, dictatorships, and the uncertainty of the future – like leaves blown away by a careless wind. And yet the artists’ labour - recovering these material crumbs of the past, giving them a voice and connecting them to a wider cultural network - speaks of unyielding resilience, of root work. Sociology author, Avery F. Gordon, employs the concept of haunting to articulate instances of repressed social violence that keep seeping into the present:

‘I used the term haunting to describe those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view’. (xvi, 1997/2008)

Although coming from the past, a ghost haunts in the present. Similarly, although of the past, these restless moving images have something to say in this moment.

All we have of the house are stories; they are fragile and they can be lost if we stop telling them.

In The Poetics of Space, philosopher Gaston Bachelard introduces us to the phenomenology of dwelling, a subjective account of the ways in which we inhabit spaces, particularly the home. The psychological and emotional connections we develop and hold for the rest of our lives with the home or with homely spaces make the case for the idea that we aren’t merely contained by them – they shape our identity and our sense of being and belonging.

When I was a student, I worked as a cleaner for a few years, which took me to many homes around London. Despite their similar architectural features and furnishings, I’ve come to think of homes as spaces that only have meaning for their inhabitants. Although we associate them with feelings such as comfort and safety, which opens a path to empathy and dialogue around the idea of home, truly what your home means to you is an assortment of real stories, imagined life and emotions that shift with time – a bundle accessible to no one but you. Bachelard calls this ‘psychological elasticity’. Although we can project our own, deeply intimate meanings of home onto other people’s hearths, their homes remain just houses for us, until we are being let in the complex life that animates these spaces, until we share in the secrets of these dwellings. We all have our own poetics of space, and perhaps sharing it with others might make us less vulnerable to haunting or dissipate the haunting altogether.

Hello?

My great-grandparents’ home was a foundationless adobe house they built with their own hands in the 1950s, that is now leaning to its left as if it had lost all solidity. My grandmother and her brothers and sisters fix the cracks in the walls every year but the truth is that there is no cure for this is a falling house. My grandmother moved to the city with her husband in the ‘60s and together they lived in a newly-built socialist block of flats, where my parents still live today. In Romania, the history of our homes is rather short. In London, I’m fascinated by lives carrying on in homes built in Victorian times.

A home, therefore, as anthropologist Mary Douglas writes, is not only space, but it also has structure in time:

‘[b]ecause it is for people who are living in that time and space, it has aesthetic and moral dimensions. (…) Why some homes should have more complex orienting and bounding than others depends on the ideas that persons are carrying inside their heads about their lives in space and time. For the home is the realization of ideas.’

The filmmakers selected for this screening bring to light temporal entanglements affecting their families or their homelands as ways of processing, questioning, and putting individual and collective histories in order. There are no straightforward answers, the connections are hard to grasp. Sometimes there are no clear questions. The ghosts, however, demand our attention.