UNPACKING THE HOME
If belonging blooms from continuity, then what rituals may repair a rupture? Your life is lived in continuity. Every moment lived by your same self, the same yourself. That time has aged your terrestrial vessel only reinforces your certainty that you have always been you, the you you are today. Thus you invent your identity, the scaffold that projects and protects your sense of continuity with your past, present, and future selves. (1/4)
Now imagine that the home is analogous to the self, and the continuity of "home" is constructed just like the identity of "self." Home is that mysterious notion of dignity that can be imbued into or torn from any place or space we occupy. And how does this imbuing occur; or the tearing away? What are the rituals of either continuity or rupture that encourage or stifle our creation and consecration of the home?
(2/4)
In Unpacking the Home, ethnographer Dane Galloway turns the camera homeward to capture the details and dilemmas at play in one such ritual, specifically the ritual of moving house, with a focus on what goes on during the packing of the photos adorning the walls and what goes into then rearranging them in the new house. How does this ritual establish continuity from place to place binding together the always-present, never-final home? And how does this ritual metaphorically represent the way we hold our senses of self together internally via a constant revising and reincorporating of memory worlds?
(3/4)
Witness one family's ongoing attempt to subvert the generational threads of rupture undergirding the belonging and structure inherent to the ritual of curating the home museum. Follow Dane as he documents and participates in the family ritual of taking down pictures at one house and then putting them up at the new one, thus creating the continuity of the home. Ultimately, the hope is to leave the viewer curious about their own temporal sense of continuity and belonging, stemming from a shared question: how does the deliberate curation of the home museum serve to create continuity amidst the reality of distance, death, denial, and rupture?
(4/4)
UNPACKING THE HOME
tl;dr
This presentation is a pitch for a short ethnographic documentary that will examine my family's ritual of packing up the pictures on the walls and then putting them up again when we move from house to house. The bulk of the video work, interviews, and participant-observation will occur during the next planned move, which will be in the Spring of 2024.
WHAT NOW?
01
CONTINUITY(GENEALOGY)≠RUPTURE([R]EVOLUTION)
aka continuity is the opposite of rupture...or is it?
Essential Questions: What is continuity? What is the role of temporal or historical continuity in understanding our present, individually or collectively? How does one's sense of continuity with the past and future impact their sense of the present?
02
CONTINUITY:BELONGING≈RUPTURE:ALIENATION
aka continuity leads to belonging.
Essential Questions: How does belonging emerge as a factor of sense of continuity? What role does continuity play in creating the conditions for belonging to emerge or dissolve?
03
f(CONTINUITY)*f(BELONGING)=RITUAL^x
aka ritualized curation of the visuals of the home museum may restore continuity in the case of rupture
Essential Question: If rupture and continuity are in constant dialectic – and if the tendency of entropy will lead us always back to rupture – then what rituals of the so-called home may mitigate the inevitable, impending break?
01
CONTINUITY(GENEALOGY)≠RUPTURE([R]EVOLVUTION)
aka continuity is the opposite of rupture...or is it?
Essential Questions: What is continuity? What is the role of temporal or historical continuity in understanding our present, individually or collectively? How does one's sense of continuity with the past and future impact their sense of the present?
02
CONTINUITY:BELONGING≈RUPTURE:ALIENATION
aka continuity leads to belonging.
Essential Question: How does belonging emerge as a factor of sense of continuity? What role does continuity play in creating the conditions for belonging to emerge or dissolve?
BELONGING
CONTINUITY
03
f(CONTINUITY)*f(BELONGING)=RITUAL^x
aka ritualized curation of the visuals of the home museum may restore continuity in the case of rupture
Essential Question: If rupture and continuity are in constant dialectic – and if the tendency of entropy will lead us always back to rupture – then what rituals of the so-called home may mitigate the inevitable, impending break?
RITUAL
RITUALS
RUPTURE
ALIENATION
OF DENIAL
OF REMEMBERING
CONTINUITY
BELONGING
THE RITUAL
PACKING, UNPACKING, AND PUTTING UP PHOTOS ON THE WALLS
BUT WHY THIS SUBJECT AND WHY THIS APPROACH?
“For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.”
- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
INFLUENCES AND REFERENCES
This project is interdisciplinary in scholarship and medium. It draws from the phenomenology and history of place (Bachelard, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Crane), the rhetoric of subjectivity/selfhood (Butler, Morrison, Ahmed), the anthropology of family ritual (Docot, Han, Pandian), and the complementary methods of video essay (Berger) and ethnographic documentary (Docot). In addition to Gaston Bachelard (see quotes in previous section), this project's key influences are:
THE PLAN
01.
Pre-production (project planning, ideation, treatment, script drafting) - Fall 2023
02.
Production (filming, interviews, participant-observation) - Spring 2024
03.
Re-scripting (footage review, preliminary editing, gap analysis) - Spring 2024
04.
Follow-up (interviews, archives, video, foley, clearances) - Summer 2024
05.
Post-production (audio, video, color grading, layers, partnerships) - Summer 2024
TEST FOOTAGE
(Hover your mouse arrow over main video to enable audio)
