Home - Between Screens

Abstract

This paper offers a representation of the author’s experiences of home during the Covid 19 pandemic, experienced from the autoethnographic perspective of an arts practitioner. The theme is explored in the experimental spaces and intersections ‘between screens’ (home/work, virtual/actual, digital/textile, professional/domestic, academic/creative). The enquiry is pursued through an interdisciplinary practice, which generates both theory through practice and a theorised practice, to enact and illuminate the entanglement of the professional/domestic, embodied by this artist/mother/lecturer/Ph.D. candidate whilst performing her/my role(s) and homeworking within the domestic environment. Viewing Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film, Jeanne Deilman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles in early lockdown was instrumental in thinking through this professional/domestic ‘work(wo)manship’ (my neologisms). When witnessed through Microsoft TEAMS and Zoom technologies, domestic gestures become lasting artefacts of daily house/home life, whilst also operating as a method of arts production. My intention is to develop a practice-based discourse on the professional/domestic phenomenon of working from home, situated between Jeanne Dielman and Bracha L. Ettinger, as a method to reflect upon the (in)visibility of occupations in the home. Professional/domestic life is explored through my D.I.Y. matrixial making methods to address how work(wo)manship can be ‘pieced’ or ‘stitched’ together, and where the (im)materiality of the screen is (re)positioned between textile theory and digital assemblage, intertwined with bricolage, assemblage, matrixial theory and art activism as a context for making work(wo)manship visible.