On Saturday, I was at a photo festival in Naarden. It was excellent! Thank you, Alexandra, for taking me there!

I also liked the theme: Home.

These photos standing in the middle of the grassy fort are the two I really like.

Each image showed a complete living room setup, placed not inside a house or building but out on the streets at night. Rugs, couches, lamps, bookshelves, everything carefully arranged and staged, absurdly cosy, and entirely exposed.

---

A living room without walls

I stood there, trying to decide whether I found it beautiful, ridiculous, or painfully familiar. Maybe all of them?

I felt fascination because they were beautiful and bold. I felt resonance and sadness, because they mirror my efforts to build “a life” in places (or systems) that will never truly contain me. I also felt admiration because they show vulnerability and what comfort means in the middle of chaos.

For me personally, somehow, these photos feel more familiar than the exhibition where they display a lot of portraits of immigrants.

A False Sense of Shelter

Is this idea where safety dragged into public place, a home?

Is it still a home when placed outside the boundaries of safety?

Is “home” a space, or is it just the act of pretending we belong somewhere?

Can we really ever make a home in this transient, collapsing world?

For me, who has spent most of my life not feeling like I belong, a home is a fragile thing.

I ask myself a lot, what does it mean to belong when you always feel slightly misplaced, no matter where you stand, anyway?

I moved countries, rebuilt my life, and questioned systems, identity, and purpose. These photos hit too personal. Like an attempt I know too well.

No matter how much I don’t feel human, I am after all, a human. And the human needs to belong, to anchor meaning, in a world that offers no guarantees.

In so many ways, I now feel more “at home” here, among strangers, in a different language, than I ever did in my so-called home country, or even among family. And yet, that feeling doesn’t really sit in stone, it wobbles on shifting ground.

The feeling of belonging… will it ever come?

Or is it just another room I decorate in my solitude, knowing I may never stay?

So what and where is home, really?

Maybe home is something we build because the world is indifferent and won’t offer us one?

Maybe it’s an act of rebellion against impermanence? An absurd ritual we repeat, over and over, to insist that something can be ours, even in a world that never really belongs to us?

Maybe it’s the ache that reminds me that I’m  still searching?

Or the fragile peace that comes from accepting I might never fully arrive?