Being, Entombed
A Poetic Photo-Essay on Home, Transformation, and Identity
Year
2024
Location
Ireland
"Being, Entombed" is a poetic photo-essay, which comprises eleven diptych-collages and eleven free verses delineating the evolution of home as a dynamic space of becoming and alterity rather than a place of origin or destination. This photographic series proposes a deconstructive depiction, positing home as a structural necessity and reflecting on it as an inevitable statement of differentiation that can be visualized as a porous geographical border of in-/exclusion, an existential boundary between safety and threat, or a locus of transformation in the face of encountering the other and discerning an otherness at the heart of the self.
Being synonymous with a tomb (oikesis), home (oikos) marks a place of transformation and emerges as a paradoxical space that entombs difference, endowing it with an identity and a name, but only in relation to another name. Thus, the metaphorical entombment of difference within the home highlights the complex interplay between self and other, inside and outside, stability and change, suggesting both confinement and potential for metamorphosis. Home is portrayed not as a particular locale but as a spacing of difference, in which new distances and proximities between the same and the non-same are discovered and negotiated all the time.
Consequently, in "Being, Entombed," home is always "on the move," housing a nexus of evolving relations and giving place to all determinations while itself drifting away in an aporetical way. One is left to witness how autonomous selfhood is born out of one's contact with otherness, as one passes through the ever-shifting world in a vain attempt to anchor oneself. In such a way, home is disclosed as a paradigmatic, self-contradictory, and performative narrative that has at its source a universal need, despite its ever-contested and perplexing character.
1
From the chaos of inception emerged the self, through the violence of primary assertion. The I was bestowed with a name, which differentiated one thing from another and answered the question of the meaning of being. To be was to know where to belong.
2
The outside world was an absolute, treacherous beyond—a realm of perilous unknowns. Stepping into its midst, one risked dissipating completely. The present was a derangement, a dislocation, and an out-of-jointness. To preserve oneself, a boundary between the I and the other had to be drawn. Thus, a safe enclosure was built.
3
The I fashioned itself into an object of knowledge, reproducing its own self-identification through repeated words. “Home” denoted the dominion of “my” enduring “being,” shielded from the threat of contamination. To encounter the same was good.
4
First, there was a desire for safety—a need born of danger. Then, there was a will to wall off one’s sovereign domain. Foreignness was expelled in favor of nativeness. What welcomed “self” repelled “alterity.” Enclosed within a line of demarcation, one suspended the play of the world, splitting multiplicity into containable objects. One became a mask and a facade among many.
5
Despite the world’s great movement and rumble, the I built one’s place of respite brick by brick. Rest was desirable. Yet, one fateful day, the ground trembled and parted beneath one’s feet. The home became a site of rupture. Yearning for peace, one gazed into the face of otherness. Once more, one had to be displaced before a boundary could be reformed.
6
With only the certainty of one’s own estrangement, one learned to be the dominus of oneself. One built many homes under the dome of the heavens, expelling nativeness in favor of foreignness. When “otherness” shed the cloak of the “self,” to be was not to belong but to wander.
7
Within the inter-exteriority of one’s transient abode, fear whispered, “Who goes there?” It was not in one’s nature to lift the veil and look into the specter of one’s annihilation. “No one. I exist only through relation now.”
8
One recalled that the wall had always been determined by the inevitability of the window. Yet, one had also known the distinctness of all things. One built a dwelling with a view of alterity and welcomed the stranger at the unassailable distance of two freedoms.
9
Like a tomb, the vessel of one’s home marked a site of transformation. Like death, life has passed through and moved from here to there. The I has followed in oneself the traces of the other. One’s name resounded with many names.
1
0
Home became a space of one’s own alterity, where one surrendered to the non-coincidence with oneself and thus experienced oneself. The locus of life was the crevice of the earth, the ebbing and flowing tides. One was no longer ensnared but released into the half-forgotten memory of the originary oscillation. Home was but a passing through, a new emergence.
1
1
An openness into an absolute beyond, one came and went and was no more. One’s name became a syllable in another’s.