Home as havest
a prosoal project to Es.Devlinstudio
members: sara al mutlaq , eve lipsink , saskia , elleCountry: LONDON
Genre: 2024
In other words, to us, home is a space where growth is encouraged and the environments we cherish are always evolving. This was the feeling that we aimed to simulate during our time working on the project - Evoking feelings of home in its absence through the harvest of our origins.
Our proposal is an immersive experience which would be situated in Hyde Park. We want to encourage people to tell their own stories and to visualise the UNHCR data on displaced refugees and stateless people. The goal is educating the audience with stories surrounding the idea of home which may be different to their own.
We have divided up the experience into 3 “chapters”. Chapter 1: The Garden, Chapter 2: The Entryway, Chapter 3: The Platform. Each chapter gets more and more personal with the aim to give the audience different contexts using various techniques of storytelling
The installation starts with a garden. Within the garden we have four different kinds of plants.
We picked sunflowers for Ukraine, Olive trees for Palestine, Wheat for afg and Jasmine for Syria.
We had picked these 4 countries as they are the countries with the highest refugee count according to the UNHCR and UNRWA. Syria has 13, 519 350, Ukraine, 11, 816, 637, Afghanistan, 10, 828, 748 and Palestine 6, 065, 059 with an additional 1.9 million since Israel's invasion of Gaza.
By assigning each country a corresponding flower we were able to use flora as a way to represent and visualise the data collected on refugees, within a garden space that the audience would be able to walk through.
Once the spectator has passed through the garden, they are then led into a transitional hallway which connects the garden to the rest of the structure which is used for the final chapter.
The walls are adorned with handmade quilts with symbolic motifs sewn into it. Each image correlates back to one of the countries we have picked and the symbol has cultural relevance to that country and the folk art of its history.
The stories that we have decided to relay through the quilt come either from personal research or interviews that we have conducted as a group.
Our stage acts as a platform for performance and storytelling, giving refugees and people with diverse backgrounds an opportunity to share their stories of home using different formats.
Within the performances we decided to include transitions between the performers, so that the audience is able to distinguish the start and the end of a performance, and also where the performer originates from. This is in the form of a light. The lights will create shadows of a specific pattern which relates to one of the four countries we are exploring. The embroidery pattern will encompass the stage before the start of each performance, acting as a moment of silent recognition to each performer's background.