In this panel discussion we explore how the concept of home and domesticity is becoming disconnected from the traditional understanding of a house. 

How has the meaning of home changed in today’s mobile society? What constitutes home for those who have had to forcedly abandon or voluntarily leave their houses? Are temporary structures an appropriate architectural response? And how is domesticity determined by temporality, sensory experience, personal affection, collective memory, and social networks?

Speakers:
Robert Mull – Head of the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Brighton; curator of multiple shows on the Calais Jungle
Mike Seal – Reader in Critical Pedagogy, Newman University, Birmingham; editor of 'Understanding and Responding to Homeless Experiences, Identities and Cultures'
Helen Taylor – writer, researcher and lecturer on refugees and migration; author of 'Refugees and the Meaning of Home: Cypriot Narratives of Loss, Longing and Daily Life in London'
Victor Buchli (chair) – Professor of Material Culture, UCL; author of 'An Archaeology of the Immaterial'; editor of 'Home Cultures'

What is a home without a house?

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Wolfgang Tillmans RA (b.1968) is regarded as one of the most influential figures working within photography today. In 2000, he was the first non-British artist to receive the Turner Prize. Since the
early 1990s Tillmans has been challenging the potentiality of making pictures. His work has epitomized a new kind of subjectivity in photography, pairing intimacy and playfulness with social
critique and the persistent questioning of existing values and hierarchies. Through his seamless integration of genres, subjects, techniques, and exhibition strategies, he has expanded conventional
ways of approaching the medium, and his practice continues to address the fundamental question of what it means to create pictures in an increasingly image-saturated world.

Wolfgang Tillmans Studio Visit Q&A, Monday 25th January 2021

Marie de Brugerolle is an art historian, curator and author. She has worked in many institutions at Mnam-Pompidou center, the MoMA in New York, the CNAC-Magasin in Grenoble, France, Carré d’art
Nîmes. Her work focuses on the history of performance art, from the 1960s to its current state of dematerialization and absorption by the society of the spectacle. This complements her theoretical project, Post Performance Future. She is the leading authority on the French-born Californian artist Guy de Cointet and has been instrumental in introducing Californian art to Europe (first retrospectives
of Allen Ruppersberg (1996), Guy de Cointet (2004) John Baldessari (2005), and Larry Bell (2010).

Marie de Brugerolle’s Lecture, 15th June 2020

Eventually Dust: On the Particulars of the Present as Seen Through Its Devices': visual culture and the idea of the end of history, the emergence of the device, the antipathy of the device to dust.

Esther Leslie (b.1964) is a lecturer in English and Humanities at Birkbeck and Co-Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. Her research interests are Marxist theories of aesthetics and culture and critical theory, with a particular focus on the work of Walter Benjamin and TheodorAdorno.

Frank B Wilderson III’s lecture, 25th October 2021

Eventually Dust: On the Particulars of the Present as Seen Through Its Devices': visual culture and
the idea of the end of history, the emergence of the device, the antipathy of the device to dust.
Esther Leslie (b.1964) is a lecturer in English and Humanities at Birkbeck and Co-Director of the
Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. Her research interests are Marxist theories of aesthetics and
culture and critical theory, with a particular focus on the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor
Adorno.

Esther Leslie’s lecture ‘Eventually Dust’ 4th May 2020

Charlie Fox (b. 1991) is a London based writer and curator.
Curator of My Head is a Haunted House, Sadie Coles HQ 5 June - 31 August 2019
‘When I was a weird little kid in suburbia obsessed with horror of all kinds, my grandfather (who isn't
alive anymore) built me a haunted house. I could pretend I was a ghost or a bat or a werewolf crying
blood over a cardboard tombstone. It was a make-believe world where my imagination could get
deranged and it was magic. My Head is a Haunted House grew out of that hallucinogenic memory
and its psychic hold on me.’

What is a home without a house?

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