Heimat

Heimatland, heimatlos, Heimatfilme, Heimatlieder, die Heimat verlassen, die Heimat besuchen, in die Heimat zurückkehren, die Heimat vergessen, was, wer, wo ist die Heimat? Mehr als eine Heimat? Es gibt keinen Plural für Heimat auf Deutsch. Heimatfront, Heimatliebe, Heimatpflege, Heimatgedanken, Heimatkundler, Heimatler, Heimatbegriff.

Home

Homeland, homeless, homely, home town, home team, home movie, home buyer, home improvement, Home Depot, homecoming queen, homeland security, home base, homeboy, homegirl, leaving home, visiting home, returning home, coming home, going home, forgetting home, what, who, where is home? More than one home? Many homes. There is no plural for home in German. Home front, homemade, homegrown, home banking, home shopping, home plate, home fries.

For the last few years, my work has showed an autobiographical tendency mixed with references to American and German pop—and consumer—culture. My interest in this somehow personal comparison between Germany and America and their cultural differences, has recently shifted towards a more fundamental question. Because I would consider both the Rhein-Main region around Frankfurt in Germany and the San Francisco Bay Area my home nowadays, as there is a sort of familiarity and sense of sameness with both places and cultures, the question is what is home anyways, and what does it mean to feel at home in one place or perhaps many places?

Edgar Reitz's 1984 TV-series Heimat—A German Chronicle suggests that a feeling or sense of home somewhat naturally develops over generations in a family, and more importantly is bound to one specific community and place, normally a person's place of birth and childhood.

In A Nation of Provincials—The German Idea of Heimat the author Celia Applegate argues that the notion of Heimat is a unique German concept for the creation of a national identity, which seems obvious but questionable. Due to my own experience, the term Heimat is rather linguistically unique, but describes certain activities relating to people's experiences of identifying with a home or place of belonging, which are activities that can be found in many diverse forms in cultures around the world.

So far my investigation of this question of what is home has turned into a group of new paintings, drawings, and sculptures that explore this notion of Heimat or Home by constructing spaces and objects from memories that I associate with being at home both in San Francisco and Germany.