We welcome you to our home. As you log onto www.project-go-home.com, these words slowly emerge from the gauzy white background on the upper left corner of the main page. The sentiment is echoed in the center of the page, with the slow appearance of the words we welcome you to.... But the phrase is cut short by the profile of a woman in a chef’s hat, eyes locked on a second chef-hatted woman to her right. The second woman looks straight out, with a rectangle like a license plate over her eyes reading, “GO-HOME.” The deflection of the human gaze on this web-based art project’s opening page suggests the difficulty of communicating human warmth over the impersonal medium of the Internet. And we are being welcomed to — what? The implicit metaphor of a home-page is immediately called into question.
The go_HOME project was in fact conceived in a spirit of excitement about the potential of Internet technology and transglobal mobility to allow for the exploration of a new consciousness of “home.” Sandra Sterle and Danica Dakic met through the international artist fellowship program Artslink in 1999, and immediately recognized the similarity of their paths and preoccupations. Both were born and educated in countries that made up the former Yugoslavia (Croatia and Bosnia respectively); both left as voluntary “art migrants” to establish second homes in Western Europe, years before war convulsed the countries of their birth; both had employed technology in their art to capture the dissonances and shifting identities inherent in their experiences of multiple homes. They stayed up most of one night talking and came bleary-eyed but energized the next morning to Program Director Fritzie Brown with a proposal. They wanted to come to New York City to create an experimental home, made up of both a physical residency and a virtual “home” on the Internet. This virtual home would include personal diaries, recipes, photographs, and even short Quicktime™ movies, in an attempt to recreate on the Internet the lived, sensory experience of a home (at one point in the brainstorming process the idea of web-streaming scratch ‘n’ sniff was raised and only reluctantly discarded). Furthermore, Sandra and Danica envisioned using internet technology to create a kind of extended living room, in which artists and theorists in New York and Eastern Europe could engage one another, and the interested public, in live web-streamed dinner discussions around migration, globalization, national identity, technology, and the impact of these issues on the experience of “home.” New York City was chosen both for its status as a diverse city of immigrants and for its distance from Europe, which Sandra and Danica hoped would afford them a degree of perspective and room for personal reflection. Fritzie was intrigued by the idea and eventually located a grant to fund it; writer and curator Katherine Carl was recruited as Co-Director; a beautiful split level loft on Franklin Street was rented and furnished; and finally, after months of intensive planning over e-mail, Sandra and Danica arrived in New York at the beginning of September 2001 to start a four-month residency.
One of the central themes to emerge from the resulting project is that despite the power of the Internet and travel to fold distance, place matters. This was vividly illustrated when, two days after Sandra arrived in New York with her partner Dan and their three-month old son Adrian, hijacked airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center towers. Sandra’s personal diary entry for September 11th records her progression of thought from relaxed abstractions in the early morning about Adrian’s response to new homes, to the sudden need after the first plane crashed to know exactly where her building was in relation to the World Trade Center towers, to the moment of panic when she learned from Fritzie’s phone call that she was a mere seven blocks from the burning towers. She then frantically tried to figure out in which specific corner of the apartment she and her son should take cover if the towers fell. Having set out to investigate the most theoretical issues of “home,” Sandra and Danica were thus from the beginning thrown instead into a profound awareness of the fragility of a home as an actual, physical structure. The vulnerability of all of home’s ephemeral qualities to changes in its environment became painfully clear over the next week, as the relentless sounds of sirens, heavy vehicles, and jackhammers punctured sleeping hours and a “smell of death” pervaded the loft on Franklin street. The irony of coming from Bosnia and Croatia to confront this new “war zone” was quickly apparent. “Please come back home,” Danica’s mom pleaded. “It is so safe here in Sarajevo.” To seek refuge from New York in the former Yugoslavia began to seem like a real possibility for Sandra, who felt tremendously uneasy bringing her son so close to danger. Over the next month, as Anthrax-cases spread waves of anxiety through the city, as her family repeatedly urged her to come back to Croatia, and with Fritzie and Katherine making it clear that she should feel free to leave, Sandra began to confront on a daily basis the question of whether she should literally “go home.”
Instead, Sandra moved with her family to Greenpoint, Brooklyn and continued working on the project. In part, Sandra’s decision to stay came from an understanding that, even as the traumatic events of 9/11 had thwarted Danica and Sandra’s desire for distance and perspective, they had magnified the issues at the heart of the go_HOME investigation. On the one hand, as Sandra articulated in the project’s first dinner discussion, 9/11 re-enforced that “attachment to real space somehow always produces suffering.”
Many of the artists, architects and theorists who gathered on September 23rd to discuss “Architectures of Migration” seemed to share the perception that home was more an idea than a place to go; as architect Leo Motrcin explained, “I live here in New York, which is my home now, but my real home is always this abstract notion of a little house in a little town in Croatia...no matter what.” The definition of “home” as a feeling, rooted in the body and in memory, which we create around us wherever we go, seems a precondition to the phenomenon which Katherine Carl called (in an interview I held with her and Fritzie Brown in February) “a transglobal way of being — the new nomadism.” In a sense, this lifestyle of frequent movement, shared to some degree by Danica, Sandra, and many of the guests at the four go_HOME dinners — and the abstract sense of home on which it is predicated — is very much what the go_HOME project set out to examine. The web presentation of these dinners reveals moments of cautious enthusiasm about the new strategies for “relocating culture” and “reproducing home” which the Internet makes possible. Also fueling these women’s energetic dialogue at times is a desire to defy the popular image of the “Bosnian refugee” — to show that migration can be a voluntary and positive act of self-creation, rather than the passive flight of a victim.
Even as it forwards these exciting new possibilities for women in an age of globalization, the Project go_HOME webpage registers at times profound doubts about the ultimate sustainability of this rootless existence. On October 25th, Sandra wrote in her diary:
Home...I feel I am becoming crazy with the way of life we live. Me and Dan are constantly travelling and are having stuff all around. We are creating homes everywhere we go. Instant homes. I already know it. It takes me three days to create an atmosphere of home.
One thing I miss is a routine. To wake up every day near the same window.
Danica’s diary is less traditional: we are given for each month a cacophony of pasted headlines and sound-bites, such as “‘Wherever you go, you don’t feel safe,’ a woman laments,” behind which Danica swims with breaststrokes up and down the page, in a sterile white suite, with eyes closed in an expression of introspective serenity — or desensitized detachment.
The major strategy that Danica, Sandra, Fritzie and Katherine adopted to recreate a sense of home in their chaotic circumstances involved the acquisition, preparation, and joyous consumption of food and drink. The centrality of this process to the go_HOME experience is evident in the chef’s hat motif, the inclusion of recipes, and the attention to questions of food consumerism which run throughout the dinner discussions. The experiences of shopping for whitefish (a staple of Croatian cuisine) in Chinatown, drinking Polish beer in Brooklyn, and hunting down Bosnian spices in Queens emerged as an involuntary commentary on the new culinary landscapes made possible by globalization. Here again the go_HOME experience had two simultaneous stories to tell. Globalization’s shining moment came in the fourth and final dinner, when Jonus Ademovic, a Bosnian architect living in NYC, brought as a dinner present three bottles of mineral water from three different sources: Sarajevska Mineralna Voda from Bosnia, Knjaz Milos from Serbia, and Radenska from Slovenia — all purchased in Astoria Queens. This gesture struck a bright chord amongst dinner participants. However, the essentially and often hilariously incomplete nature of this kind of consumer globalization was perfectly captured by a story Fritzie told me in October. In Fritzie’s words:
Dan, I remember, he’s over there in Greenpoint, so he’s got an assortment of Polish beers, and he’s like “I’ve discovered this other new beer, it’s so cheap and it’s so good and it’s so delicious and so nice... And he holds up a bottle of Colt 45. And he’s pouring it into glasses. And we just erupted in laughter. And he was like “What? It’s nice beer.” And I think he still doesn’t get it. And how could he?
Thus the lived experiences of the project participants often captured the ambiguous nature of the larger patterns the project was exploring, such as globalization of consumer goods without a globalization of cultural understandings—or flow of information through technology which often disallows for flow of true communication.
The same ambivalence towards the possibilities of a true “homepage,” coiled in the visual language of the project’s opening frame, also emerged as a theme during the final two dinners, in which internet technology was pushed further in the pursuit of a transglobal simultaneity of experience. The third dinner, in which streaming video linked dinner participants in New York and Zagreb, Croatia, provided the most inspiring glimpses of these possibilities; there is in particular a photograph of the New York guests toasting a screen of guests gathered in Zagreb, also toasting, which evoked memories of a truly warm, connective moment in all of the participants I interviewed. However, as Katherine Carl qualifies, these moments were fleeting. To get a feeling for the experience of trying to align these two dinners over the Internet, it is revealing to read a transcript of the online chat which became the main channel of communication between New York and Zagreb when sound gave out. These excerpts, like so many elements of the go_HOME project, stand as inadvertent but telling testimonies to the possibilities for fragmentation and isolation within the “new nomadic” model of home:
b92: we can hear ourselves over the net so you should hear us too
b92: we hear some industrial noise from time to time
deputy: me too
b92: is it coming from you?
deputy: no!sandra and dan: PROBABLY OUR WORLD IS BECOMING MUCH MORE FRAGMETED THAN BEFORE.
b92: can you see us?
gohome: We can see but not hear
b92: to sandra: that is consequance of globalization
b92: can you hear now
and dan: I believe so!
gohome: no, no sound
gohome: keep typing
As the above excerpt suggests, Dan and Sandra were not in New York, but rather communicating via e-mail from Zadar, Croatia, for the final dinner. Sandra’s decision to finally go back with Adrian to Europe came after a plane crashed down in Queens in November, on the same day that Dan was scheduled to fly back to Europe alone. Having completed most of what she had set out to do, Sandra finally gave in to her longing for return — and in the process provided a wonderful clinching sequence to the go_HOME project. After sharing through Sandra’s diary her three months of fitful sleep, intense work pressure, and constant vigilance in a destabilized New York landscape, we share on a gut level her feeling of relief upon returning to her family home, where she will receive enough help with Adrian to find some time for herself. No theoretical version of “home” can approach the true reality of home we instantly recognize in Sandra’s pictures of her December in Zadar. Smiling cousins hoist babies, Sandra and Dan take lazy strolls along the Zadar river where they first kissed, and Sandra’s mom has donned the chef’s hat and is ladling garlic water into a Stockfish “al bianco,” the taste of which, the internet observer can only imagine, is exquisite.