ESSAYS

I believe Sarkis's question can be continued by a series of others, among them, the question with the adverbial interrogative "Where."

What has been, is, and will be the place where we live? Is it home, common land, homeland? Or have we all lost everything?

The curator of the 2024 Venice Art Biennale Adriano Pedrosa don't discuss the question, but rather say: "Foreigners are everywhere. There's no way back. The search for home is futile. We've all become foreigners to each other, to the places we inhabit, and this began centuries ago when some countries decided to embark on a colonial march around the world."

Home is not only necessarily a place of residence. It is a state, an atmosphere, it is a phenomenon existing in a spatial-temporal [2] continuum. It is to some extent an event of the soul, localized in a certain segment, be it time or space. The causality of the human need for home as a phenomenon can be explored extensively.

Even human behavior models depended on whether a person was at home or away from home [3]. Thus, it turns out that we are completely different people at home and outside of it.

The way we have become after leaving our homes is not our decision but the result of the circumstances in which a person finds themselves. We leave our homelands, countries, lands, and regardless of our desires and capabilities, we inevitably become different people in any case.

Surviving, fighting, defending, seeking, learning, fearing — these are the basic set of actions, the infinitives of a new language of an emigrant, that each of us learns when stepping beyond the boundaries of our home, starting from leaving the mother's womb to moving with suitcases to another country. Life becomes a quest: for new jobs, social connections, and, essentially, raison d’être.

In fears and doubts, how do we save ourselves?
The refuge is the self-model of home, our consciousness, our accumulated experience, reason, returning us to ourselves, to the soul, which, fortunately, is an immutable home for us [4].

Migration is not just leaving home, but in both literal and metaphorical senses, it is crossing a certain line, whether it's a formal border of a state or a line beyond which we already feel ourselves outside of the standard safe and comfortable state.

However, by crossing the line, limits, boundaries, are we not gaining, in addition to discomfort, the desired freedom as well?

The joy of being "rootless" while still maintaining a connection to one's roots largely depends on a person's openness [5]. The most open-minded individuals choose migration not only as a way of life but also as a language of expression. The journey, overcoming distances, kilometers of roads, are poetic and conceptual for artists, creators who consciously choose such a lifestyle and existence, constructing a creative approach around movement in space, creating a whole approach around the phenomenon of mobility, such as walking art, for example, Monique Besten. This migration can be considered existential [6].

For some, and perhaps still for the majority, long-distance migration is a forced means of survival, in my opinion, largely driven by political reasons. Can migration other than existential be voluntary? Statistics, research tell us sometimes controversial conclusions. For example, labor migration is officially considered voluntary (International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, 1990). Although it's extremely difficult to agree with this.

(E)migration can end tragically. Like the brilliant 20th-century Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, who fled Germany at the very beginning of the Nazi Party's rise to power. He changed addresses 28 times in his life. His journey and search for home ended for him in the Pyrenees, where he could not cross the Spanish border (he wanted to go then to Lisbon and fly to US) because the border guards did not want to let him through with refugee documents, and in desperation and unwillingness to return and endure torture, Benjamin decided to end his life by suicide.
The next day after the incident, the border was opened.

Can we ever completely forget about the place where we were born, spent our childhood, or even more? The concept of the transmigrant [5] suggests that people leave with them connections, contacts with their native country, refusing to live only in the paradigm of a new place of residence, a new system. For decades, such a transmigrant lives amidst a multitude of homes, cultures, traditions, existing in an intermediate state.

Perhaps we are now entering an era where the word "migrant" is becoming obsolete, an era of the end of belonging and global homelessness [8], where home remains only a forgotten symbol of the past.

We, (e)migrants, can be called by different names: nomads, expats, refugees, travelers, foreigners. Or perhaps we are all pilgrims, with our strange faith, embarking on a long and vital journey to a holy place we have not yet found.

Bibliography:

[1] Official Biennale page
[2] Adolf Grünbaum, Philosophical Problems of Space and Time, 1973
[3] Watkins C. Studies in Indo-European Legal Language, Institutions and Mythology. Proc. 3-rd Indo-European conf. Indo-European and Indo-Europeans. Philadelphia, 1970. P.321-354.
[4] Gastond Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1964. Bachelard justifies his choice this way: "Our soul is our dwelling. Remembering different homes, different "rooms," we learn to live inside ourselves."
[5] Levitt, Peggy, and Nina Glick Schiller. "Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society." International Migration Review 38.145 (2004): 1002-1039.
[6] Madison, Greg (2006) Existential Migration. Existential Analysis.
[7] Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 4: 1938–1940
[8] The End of Belonging: Untold stories of leaving home and the psychology of global relocation, by Greg A Madison PhD, 2009