Hosting: Home Truths

Hosting: Home Truths, is a creative research project which considers contemporary spatial practices alongside archival materials, interrogating the legacies of labour and control that inform our domestic ecologies. In this work, hosting belies an entanglement of allegiances, and the research asks the question: What is it to host? Taking measure of the word’s entomology, that tracks from person to place, ephemeral presence to bread, guest to enemy, stranger to victim, a negotiation with the presence of an ever-evolving host emerges. This project works with an archive relating to a women’s domestic college, and maps practices of hosting and housewifery in Australia from 1920s-70s, considering them as ongoing actors in the spatial manifestation of “home.” Positioned as legitimate spatial practices, which contribute to the architecture they inhabit, it looks to understand how they inform the way home-worlds, both built and “felt,” are maintained, held, and transformed through repeated action, habits and performances of labour and care. The research methodology takes the archival artefact and performs a sequence of digestive “rituals” in its unpicking. It translates the past into a public event, creating a space to host an intermingling of gastronomic installations, video works and archival fragments. Through discourse and display of these not-so-distant practices, women’s work and “housewifery” are understood as primary devices of construction for home environments, through care and control in Australia’s domestic interiors. These often-restrictive hierarchical practices, focussed on civility, are used as a counterpoint against which a contemporary culinary materialism and associated rituals might be developed. The aim is to transgress the strict boundaries in our inherited practices of eating, homing, and maintenance. In the worlding of our domestic ecologies, this is one story of housing and homing in Australia, a story to start to tell other stories with (Haraway and Le Guin, 2019).