Belongings—How We Make Home

Sleeping, cooking, washing, warming, withdrawing, storing, hosting, hiding—we make home, and unmake it, every day. Home is less a place we possess than something continually assembled through habits, objects, bodies, infrastructures, memories, other species, and relations of care. It can offer refuge and intimacy while also reproducing inequalities, exclusions, dependencies, and silent forms of violence.

In part organised as a browsable, polyphonic A–Z, Belongings critiques the quiet dystopias of domestic life and opens affective, affirming perspectives—shuffling up the house from animals to atmosphere, from beds to bathrooms, from care to comfort, from dirt to dust, from energy to finance, from guests to hosts, from property to ritual, from sleep and tents to waste, water and windows.

Rather than defining an ideal home, Belongings reflects how dwelling is actually practised: provisionally, imperfectly, collectively and sometimes impossibly. Moving between cultural criticism, everyday observation, speculation and humour, it imagines domestic life as a spatial practice that is both political and affective, material and immaterial—a field in which the strange and the familiar blur and other forms of intimacy, cohabitation and resistance might be rehearsed.