About
Installation view of 101 ways to long for a home, Woordfees, Stellenbosch, 2018
This site is dedicated to the artist's book installation called 101 ways to long for a home by Emma Willemse. To view the diverse artworks comprising Emma Willemse's entire art practice, click here.
More on Emma Willemse here.
Access the catalogue of 101 ways to long for a home here
Watch the film about 101 ways to long for a home here
Read about the composer Michael Blake's New Music piece called Displaced: 101 ways to long for a home (2018) here and listen to an excerpt here
As a reference to how knowledge in encyclopaedias is organised, the visual information contained in 101 ways to long for a home has been divided into 5 volumes. Each volume contains a foreword, introduction, 5 chapters and an index. The chapters of each volume are titled as follows: Books about Loss, Container Books, Rupture Books, Boat Books and House Books.
A short description of 101 ways to long for a home
101 ways to long for a home (2014 - ongoing) is a project by the conceptual artist Emma Willemse, constructing more than a hundred and one handmade artist's books, sculptural objects and containers as part of the installation called 101 ways to long for a home. Intended as an alternative archive for the displacement experience, the number 101 alludes to infinity and imply the never-ending losses of homes endured by people all over the world.
The collection of books and objects is unified by the aesthetics of the exposed underside of discarded parquet floor blocks, which are used extensively throughout, and are mainly sourced from the gentrified suburb called Woodstock in Cape Town, South Africa. Other mediums include a range of archival papers, fabrics, found images and objects, while techniques such as linocut, monotype, collage, drawing and painting are employed.
The title of the installation suggests an ironic reference to the quick-fix promised by self-help books, as a critique of the notion that trauma linked to the displacement experience can be cured by prescriptive formulae.
101 ways to long for a home has been exhibited in various installation configurations in Florence; Paris; Dakar, Senegal; London; Cape Town; Stellenbosch; Johannesburg; Richmond, Northern Cape, South Africa; Darling, Western Cape, South Africa.
Artist statement
“…if loss is known only by what remains of it, then the politics and ethics of mourning lie in the interpretation of what remains – how remains are produced and animated, how they are read and sustained.”
(Eng,DL & Kazanjian,D (eds) 2003:ix)
Introduction
The series of artist books titled 101 ways to long for a home, is a long-term project, conceived as an imaginary manual and archival tool to record and re-imagine ways to process the loss of a home. The series consist of books in various formats and executed in a range of digital and hand rendered techniques, though with a common binding factor: all the covers are constructed from inverted reclaimed parquet floor blocks.
Aesthetics of loss
My interest in the archaeology of psychological trauma related to displacement stems from my own experiences of the loss of several homes in the 1990’s. The contemporary relevance of this thematic concern is underlined by the current involuntary uprootment of people due to wars, political strife and xenophobia. My research in this field focuses on the mapping and navigation of the constructs of place, memory and identity within the displacement experience.
Discarded parquet floor blocks
I have used discarded parquet floor blocks extensively in my works as a reminder of the bag of blocks salvaged from a home in which I lived, a few hours before it was demolished.
The floor of a house maps the inside spaces of a home, it defines the spaces where people experience their most intimate moments. By retrieving the floor blocks and inverting them in my artworks I attempt to re-connect to these experiences. In her book The skin of the film, Laura U Marks maintains that objects “are not inert and mute but they tell stories and describe trajectories” (2000:120). In this way, Marks assigns an animated role to objects in which their meaning and significance resides in their physicality, their materiality and their tactility, in the same way “as habit stores memory in the body” (2000:121). For me, the trace-like qualities of erasure and elusiveness inherent in the inverted parquet block fragments elude to the imperfect memory processes linked with trauma prevalent during displacement.
The floor blocks constructed as covers for the artist’s books are sourced from various second hand building shops in South Africa, usually in areas where social engineering practices, disguised as urban renewal, are prevalent. They are direct links to the many floors in many homes that do not exist anymore.
The body of the book
When the floor block covers are opened, the bodies of the books unfold in cascading concertinas, constituting the pages of the books. Here, the visual approach focuses on re-imagining a home-like structure assembled from several found images, (such as in The Grieving Book and The Weeping Book. By surrendering this image to a series of invasive visual strategies such as blurring, fading and fragmenting, partial fragmented narratives of remembering and forgetting a home are excavated, documented and archived. This recurring image can be seen in its various stages of decay in the digital prints, linocuts and photogravures forming the pages and bodies of the books.
The books are exhibited on a trestle table covered with brown packaging paper, referring to materials used when belongings have to be packed to leave a home. The allusion to mobility is further enhanced through a performative intervention. Taking the lead from a sand timer, books are closed, opened, stacked and repositioned as a kind of re-enactment of relocation.
Attention has been given to the visual relationships in books placed near to each other to allude to an ongoing narrative flowing from the one book to the other.
Book format and its meaning
In its format and content the series of books in the installation 101 ways to long for a home challenges the traditional notion of a book as a collection of orderly organized knowledge. In contrast, the collection is an attempt to review the fragile, complex and fluid nature of knowledge dealing with trauma and place.
The title relates in an ironic way to the popular anticipation of the quick-fix promised by self-help literature. The expressly stated quantity of works that will form the finished project - 101 books - is an attempt to critique the prescriptive notion held in the displacement knowledge field that such traumatic experiences are able to be fixed into formulae.
The intentions with this series of artists’ books are to provoke questions rather than providing answers, to reveal a broken narrative of remnants and traces, rather than telling a linear story in time. It is above all a response to the ways we experience space, and how the pre-history of a place impacts on our understanding of place and place-making.
Eng, D.L. & Kazanjian,D. (eds). 2003. Loss: The politics of mourning. Berkeley: University of California Press
Marks, L.U. 2000. The skin of the film: intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the senses. Durham: Duke University Press.