on identity and identifications

evi renieri 2010

Amartya Sen writes:

“Identities are always plural.”

We are all individually involved in identi-ties of various kinds in disparate contexts, in our own respective lives, arising from our background, our associations or social activities.The person has to decide on the relative im-portance, to attach to the respective iden-tities, which will again depend on the exact moment.”* Through this project I explore ways to rep-resent visually, the plurality of identities in which I am involved. However, often, the effort to decide on the

* Amartya Sen, “Identity and violence”, chapter 2: Making sense of identity

importance of the related identities in every specific context causes me great emo-tional unease.I can be simultaneously a Greek citizen and a resident of the Netherlands, a woman com-ing from a patriarchic environment and a de-fender of feminism, an independent thinker, a housewife, an artist, a student, nature and culture, a woman who desires profes-sional practice and one who also desires to create family.I do not just discover my identities.I make conscious choices for my identifica-tions. However, these choices have to be made within my particular constraints.

Giving form to identity

I began my practical research by making drawings about the essence of identity. I drew identity as a human organ. I speculated that my identity is being ceaselessly im-printed onto my soul and the two merge into one. Often, I cannot consider one separate to the other. If I had to compare the soul to an organ inside the human body, I would place it either in the middle of the chest next to the heart or inside the brain a bit behind the forehead. If it had a shape it would be compared to the human heart or to the brain, or to a kidney, or even to a huge finger-print.It would be a cluster of experiences, con-scious and unconscious ones, in space and time, bonded closely together to form a dis-

tinguishable volume.

Stuffed toy-identities

I played with the organ shaped identity passing it from one medium to the other. At a certain point I created soft stuffed, puppet-like objects. At about that time I read an article that I found relevant to this practice. The article was about the Egyptians who were providing their mummified dead with small dolls called ushabties*. Through mummifi-cation the dead person ensured his physi-cal presence in afterlife. This physicality meant that physical labor was expected from the mummified one. The ushabti , replacing the dead one, acting as a double for him, being his shadow, was there to perform the unpleasant duty.What if, by creating the stuffed doll-like-identity, I create a double, a shadow of myself, to project on it all the identities and emotions I want to escape from?It is a contradictory and ambivalent ob-ject, hated and beloved since alternatively, I project on it all my wished and treasured identities and emotions.Projection indicates the action of throwing, ejecting away from oneself. Something of my-self is thrown upon the stuffed toy.Projection is also connected, in psychology and psychoanalysis, with the projection of

* Mike Kelley, “The Uncanny”, The statue as stand-in www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/kelley/rm7.htm

subjectivity*. In Freudian theory the infant expels and projects into the external world what it finds in itself of the unpleasurable. In this way, the subject constructs for itself – even before it attains the status of subjecthood –the territories and spaces, both internal and external, which will con-stitute its world**.

* Mike Kelley, “The Uncanny”, The statue as stand-in www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/kelley/rm7.htm** Mary Ann Doane, “The location of the image: cinematic projection and scale in modernity” Pub-lished in “Art of Projection” Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon, eds. Published by Hatje Cantz Verlag in 2009

Drawing

Artworks printed on postcards become often the models for my drawings. I have a whole collection of them. There is something on these more or less known works that attracts me. These works make me think of myself, they trigger my personal memory.I begin to draw paying special attention to certain elements, ignoring anything that is unfamiliar and of small importance to me. I deform the original work in order to struc-ture, to construct, to arrange the roles and identities I am involved with.Through this selective drawing I aim to cre-ate a link between the represented artwork, the world and me. The represented artwork and my drawing act as bridges between the world and me. Through this action of appro-priating elements of an existing artwork, I attempt to create stability in an unstable overwhelming environment. I draw to select, to mark, and understand. I let me be subjec-tive and create my own translation of the world. Drawing is relative to understanding. It is the gesture, which settles the difference between the subject and the object. Here the eye, there the thing and in between the ges-ture. Drawing is the gesture that functions as a bridge*.

* Dirk Lauwaert, “De betekenis van het tekenen”

The mark

To mark is also to sign. The one who signs marks more him than what is being signed.A signature cannot be read but it can be recognized, identified*. If the sign of ‘identity’ becomes my sig-nature then this is a sort of special com-munication. It is a strategy of contact and exclusion.The ones who can identify my signature and can recognize its meaning can come in con-tact with me, everybody else is excluded. By making a sign we often want to conceal from the view or notice of the others. There lies a secret in this mark.

Color

Drawing creates distance. Color on the con-trary brings closer**. I draw using colors. It is a call for attention, the viewer’s at-tention, but at the same time I fear to let him or her come to close. I hesitate, I am afraid to be heard, I am afraid to heart and to be heart.To draw is to call for attention.Like the actor when he performs, I call for attention to my everyday life’s performanc-es.

* Dirk Lauwaert, “De betekenis van het tekenen”** Dirk Lauwaert, “De betekenis van het tekenen”

Colors

I choose my colors in two different ways that during the work process integrate one to the other and give a consistent result.The colors of my personally developed pal-ette range between greens, oranges and blues. Using their different shades I il-lustrate my different moods and feelings for things and persons.Green I translate as hope and rebirth. Or-ange is the color for change and transforma-tion and blue stands for calm and peaceful-ness but nevertheless coldness.Red stands for power and/or pain. I perceive yellow as ambivalent, it can be attractive, beloved yet unsettling and hated. Brown stands for distance and tradition.Among my favorite artists is the photogra-pher Gregory Crewdson. I like the colors he uses and the shades he creates with the help of light. Some times I look at his colors to take advice.He stages his themes and he handles color and lighting in such a manner as to create for the viewer a certain feeling of intimacy yet discomfort.His works stand as metaphors for his anxiet-ies, neuroses and longings.He hosts the spectator in a world of psycho-logical desolation.A world dominated by faded and radiant shades of blue, yellow, orange and pink.When I appropriate his color palette and I integrate it into mine I attempt to color my own anxieties, fears, dislikes and desires.

Slow drawings

I can draw fast or slow. I prefer to draw slowly. This grants me the opportunity to explore the most irrational, impulsive and unconscious parts of myself through thor-oughly performed gestures.It is possible that this is a way to recon-cile with and enjoy the unconscious, awkward parts of myself. The practice of slow drawing is at the same time an escape and resistance against the frantic rhythm of everyday life.My drawings can be beautiful or monstrous. I may not look like them but I am them. They compose my opposing selves, my positive and my negative.Drawing is ambivalent, identities too.Instabilities, ambivalences and oppositions characterize myself. There is a need to reconcile my opposing parts and my contradicting identities in or-der to achieve an integrated personality. I fight part of myself when fighting my contra-dictory identities.

Essence and potential

Through drawing I make decisions and at the same time I am open to consider different possibilities. I draw decisive lines but I leave the background empty; a free space for what is not yet articulated, for whatever

lies still in the unconscious. I make sug-gestions but not exclusions.Drawing reveals the essence of things; what is not yet formulated but exists as poten-tial*.

Line against stripes

The line is the virtuosic dominant outline of the figure; the essence of what it is. Stripes add volume to the figure. Through modeling stripes, individualism is being added to the mental ideal of the outline. A sort of individualism that cannot be found in the details of the skin but in the energy that lies underneath**. If I use this paradigm to translate my own drawings then I presume that the line acts as the ideal essence of what I point at (ex. a house, a woman, etc.) and the stripes reveal the energy I induce to the depicted object. The line is autonomous and decisive.The stripe is depended, related to other stripes. Stripes are impulsive, self-cor-recting, self-critical, complementary***,

* Dirk Lauwaert, “De betekenis van het tekenen

*** Dirk Lauwaert, “De betekenis van het tekenen

Appropriation

In our society of overproduction where al-most everything is already done, why should I produce something completely new if the things already produced have not been used yet?I cannot find enough time to savor even a small part of the cultural products that surround me. And yet, me too share the cre-ative drive and wish to add to the cultural production. I try to find my singular way to exist in this chaotic mass of objects and ideas that constitute my daily life*.I decide to borrow a few of the cultural objects which, are already produced and use them as the models for my own production. For each one of my models I take the time to make several translations.

Appropriating by means of repeating

I repeat to appropriate. I translate other artists’ works into, meaningful to me, draw-ings.The very act of repeating is an effort to integrate. Humans learn by repeating the deeds of their predecessors. Youngsters learn by repeating the acts of their par-ents, their teachers and friends. Imitating and/or repeating provide security because we identify with models already accepted.

* Nicolas Bourriaud. “Postproduction”.

Repetition can produce calm; it has a soothing effect because of its predictability.Yet none of the repetitions I perform is the same with the previous one. I change my drawings more or less in my attempt to cre-ate meaning of my respective environments and of myself.I submit the models for my drawings and my drawings themselves to respective metamor-phoses. The works that occur are in harmony to my contemporary state while still curry-ing memories of my past.

Card houses

I print my drawings, among other depictions, on cards, which I use in order to build a card-house construction.Lets say that the card-house symbolizes my-self and that the cards and the depictions upon them represent my plural identities. I use cards in order to make reference to playing cards, to postcards and to construc-tion game’s building-cards. From now on I will use the term building-cards to refer to all the different cards, which form my card-house.My building cards have openings in all their sides in order to be combined with each other and form the house construction.Likewise, my different identities are being combined to form myself.This is no smooth procedure. Part of each card has to be cut in order to receive the other. This is a sort of grafting, a sort of surgical operation. A similar operation my identities have to undergo in order to form my integrated self. The plurality of my identities comes into contact with each other, changing by ex-changing, through collisions but also through smooth merging.Each combined part resists against the pres-sure that grafting causes; and yet all parts carry each other’s weight.One can bring along fragments of identity, provided one transplants them to other soils and accepts the fact of their permanent

metamorphosis*. Can my different identities coexist and si-multaneously preserve some of their particu-lar singularities? Can a new identity come into being out of differences and singulari-ties?

Chameleon

The exterior surface of the card house con-ceals what lies beneath. It acts as an ar-tificial protective layer between the social and me, between the domestic, the personal and the public.The exterior of the house, with the printed drawings on its surface, acts as a camouflage to mimic its surrounding environment, to in-tegrate into it.

Scale

The fascination of being enveloped by an image is the symptom of an uncertainty and anxiety about the individuals relation to an increasingly incomprehensible social net-work, a deficiency of cognitive mapping, an inability to deal with the growing contra-diction between lived experience and struc

* Nicolas Bourriaud, “The Radicant”, chapter: Al-termodernity

ture*. Is then the fascination of inhabiting such an uncanny house, an attempt to understand an incomprehensible environment?Less than life size objects have an uncanny quality.The relationship between the physical viewer and the, impossible to inhabit, card house provokes a weird disturbing sensation.

Home

Home is considered to be the most important of places for the formation and the confirma-tion of identity as well as for the rise of questions around identity.The notion of identity itself is commonly understood as a shifting process of opening, differentiation and reconstruction**. The home of my childhood is the container of my memories. There I made my first iden-tifications. There, where we all spoke the same language I acquired for the first time a national identity as well as a religious one. It was there that I shared my father’s wish to become a citizen of the world and my mother’s fear to go far away from home…

* Beatriz Colomina, ”Enclosed by images: The Eame-ses’ multiscreen architecture.” Published in “Art of Projection” Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon, eds. Published by Hatje Cantz Verlag in 2009

** Hou Hanru and Jerome Sans, “My home is yours/ your home is mine”,

It is in my present home of adult life that I try out and acquire new identities and it is here where I construct a sense of belong-ing in a context of change and displacement.I claimed earlier that my card-house con-struction symbolizes myself and that its cards are my plural identities and identifi-cations, which are set in motion.However, the house can suggest among other things stability, the rooting to one place and tradition. Then how can such a house be the carrier of my identities, which are set in motion?May be the house of my childhood that I just described represents only the traditional aspects of home, which of course shaped parts of my identity but the construction I want to create is not just that. Nikos Papastergiadis writes that the sym-bolic space of the home in modernity is pressed up against both the traditional val-ues of stability and the unspecified desires for transformation. The contemporary house is full of silent am-bitions and temporary arrangements. If I am to offer my identities a “house”, a carrier, then I would like this to combine my memories of the past with my desires for the future. Papastergiadis continues commenting that there is the need to leave the traditional old home, which is bound to unchangeable customs; restricted to pure members; ruled by authoritarian father figures and stifled with superstitious beliefs. To stay there is to atrophy.But where we should set our new homes, these

new shelters for our identities and what they should look like is not specified*. Identity is not bound to a specific past or a particular place.In our days of globalization of the world along with the new ways of life and living, new forms of homes have to be created.These new homes have to adjust to the fluid, flexible, interactive way of our contemporary lives. They have to be constructing a sense of belonging in a context of change and dis-placement.Home is nowadays a place for all kinds of activities. It can be my intimate per-onal space and my work space and the space that I share with the rest family members, the space where I socialize with friends, coleagues and the rest of the world. Never before did the house have so many con-nections to the world. Television and laptop are nowadays the windows to the globalized environment. None of the above phenomena is strange any more. They are simple normal life.I lead such a normal life myself.For several years I have been living in a country different from my place of origin. This year I study in a city away from the place where I reside and recently I had to travel abroad for work.Just like so many other people, displace-ments between different places of the world push me into constant struggle between the

* Nikos Papastergiadis, “The home in modernity” Published in “My home is yours/ your home is mine”.

memory of the home and the excitement of experiencing and adventuring into the pres-ent*.

Laptop

My laptop is also becoming part of my home and sometimes even my portable home. If the home is the place where our most intimate belongings and memories are kept then I have to consider my laptop part of it. It houses several of my works. I keep in it archives of older works, my writings, photographic and video documentation of several personal and public activities. If the home mirrors a person’s personality and/or identity, I as-sume that his or her laptop does too.The laptop serves as the mobile substi-tute for my home. I can take it everywhere. Internet connection on my laptop creates a link between the rest of the world and me. Every time that I talk through Skype to my family in Greece, I get linked to my home country, to its’ actuality in real time as well as to my past.This mediated contact offers me the opportu-nity to keep the bond between my present and my past but simultaneously to keep a safety distance from my roots in order to objec-tively observe and critically question them. And not only my laptop becomes my tem

* Hou Hanru and Jerome Sans, “My home is yours/ your home is mine”. Hou Hanru and Jerome Sans.

poral mobile home. In combination with the intercity train, which takes me from Leiden to Utrecht at least three times a week, they constitute my mobile house.In this train I choose a specific compartment and a specific seat most of the times. There, I get installed, I switch on my laptop and with a cup of coffee it feels familiar, almost home for the 45 minutes my journey lasts.This feels however a little peculiar. It brings in a way the private sphere into the public. Is it, as Hou Han Rou and Je-rome Hans describe it, a transgression of the border between individual homes and the society as a borderless home for all?

Like the Radicant

Combining the building cards in different ways I can alter and expand my identity-con-struction like Bouriaud’s Radicant. Similar to the ivy plant of the botanical family of the radicants that grow their roots and add new ones as they advance, I can add new building-cards and make my construction grow and advance.The Ivy grows its secondary roots along its primary ones; it develops in accord to its host soil, it uses the host soils’ nutri-tional elements. In my turn, I build up my identities through borrowing from my host social and cultural environments.Yet this practice implies a struggle against all attachments. Is this the price I have to pay in my effort to create new meaning-ful connections between my identities? Where this mixing can take me? What sort of dynam-ics am I about to create? What sort of personal singularity will I create while surfing among a precarious so-cial network?To understand and translate the complex en-vironments in which I move I use artistic practices. I prefer to work with different mediums and not to stick on the safety net which, rigid and specific techniques offer.In a similar way I navigate during my expe-dition in the precarious archipelagos of my identities. Radicant art implies the end of the medium specific, the abandonment of any tendency

to exclude certain fields from the realm of art*. I need to change along with my changing environments. I can no longer be expressed trough a singular medium. I can no longer express a specific tradition. I have chosen to express the paths I follow and not the traditions of specific places, especially not just the singular tradition of my birth-place. I am afraid that singularity can pro-voke dominant and authoritarian attitudes. During my journey I realize that there are not ideal places, neither is there such a thing as my ideal self.Myself is being constructed through cease-less borrowings, citations and proximities. It is a dialogical narrative that unfolds between me, as subject and the surfaces I traverse, to which I attach roots to produce what might be termed an installation**. During this dialog, in order to understand and to be understood I need to perform in-numerous acts of translation.

Practicing translations

In order to understand my hosting environ-ment I literally need to translate the local language to my mother tongue.

* Nicolas Bourriaud, “The Radicant”, chapter: Altermodernity. Roots: a critique of postmodern reason ** Nicolas Bourriaud, “The Radicant”, chapter: Radicals and Radicants

Sometimes I have to translate the local language to an intermediate language, under-standable to me, before I perform the final translation to my mother tongue. Translation is not always direct.In order to be understood I need to trans-late my language to an intermediate one, and my partner has to perform a similar act of translation. This way the translation has at least two directions and two intervening stops.Since I use visual means in order to commu-nicate, similar translations from one visual medium to the other come natural to me. I displace the meaning of my or others’ im-ages from one visual form to another in order to understand and also in order to be understood.I am willing to become a tenant of the re-spective existing forms and to alter them more or less in an attempt to make them meaningful for me but also to produce mean-ing for others.When I use drawing to translate another art-ist’s work I do not stop to the first trans-lation. I perform several ones and each translation varies more or less from the previous. This is my way of research in or-der to create meaning. I need to translate the local signs and lifestyles to forms, which are meaningful for me.Translation always implies adapting the meaning of a proposition, enabling it to pass from one code to another. It also im-plies that neither of the codes or languages is self-evident.

Using translation I fight against the domi-nance of a specific form. I fight against any dominant and absolute culture. I choose for borrowings and flow between cultures and forms and mediums. I choose for connections, links and passages from one system to the other.Translation is at the center of an important ethical and aesthetic issue: it is a ques-tion of rejecting any source code that would seek to assign a single origin to works or texts*. Translation also appears today as the cat-egorical imperative of an ethics of recog-nition of the other, a task it fulfills much more effectively than merely registering otherness**. Through translation, the other, the stranger can become more accessible.For myself the other is the different one. For the other, the different is I.Translation implies the recognition of the otherness and the difference. It sug-gests recognition for the singularity of the other.It may also help to avoid generalizations as well as to avoid reducing the other to a single category.The act of translation itself implies also distance and distance can also suggest re-spect for the other. Me, you and the other have to give space to one another in order

*,2 Nicolas Bourriaud, “The Radicant”, chapter: Transfers

to articulate freely our points of view. Then we all have to give time to ourselves to understand, react and once more translate our reactions.Through translation elements belonging to a local visual or philosophical culture are transferred from a traditional universe in which they were strictly codified and fixed to one in which they are set in motion and placed beneath the gaze of a critical read-ing*. However, when we translate something we al-ways loose something that was in the origi-nal. On the other hand we also add something new to the original.

* Nicolas Bourriaud, “The Radicant”, chapter: Translated forms

Natural translated to digital

Among other things, I translate natural ele-ments into digital pictures.May be by translating nature to a digital picture I try to set the traditional percep-tion of nature in motion. May be I am trying to bring it closer to the contemporary lan-guage of digitalization; to bring my artis-tic work into line with the modes of produc-tion that are currently in use.Nowadays if something cannot be perceived in the digital way, it is possible that it will not be perceived at all.May be the digital is becoming the contempo-rary way of drawing and writing.However, it feels weird when something so artificial becomes so natural.When you go digital, you realize that you are constantly in need of the others. You are depended on the others’ cooperation be-cause digital is so complicated.May be digital is as complicated us our-selves. May be this is also why it is so charming.

Natural elements

My video camera captures what I choose to see in nature, yet what lies beneath is nature’s uncontrollable, independent exis-tence.May be my lens is becoming a magnifying glass in order to observe my nature, what lies beneath what I allow others and myself to see. As if the pictures I film are the first contact with my subconscious and my re-pressed energy.The diverse images of natural elements pos-sibly constitute a multiple portrait of my-self. They mirror my emotional states, which teeter between anxiety and calm, fragility and strength.

Water

Water structure looks like the dreamlike structure of memory.I want to dive in the waters I film. I want to dive into my past, to explore it, to find the answers to my questions.I am water. I am usually calm and clear. Sometimes I get scared of the depth and the darkness of this element, my element. Once I was told that liquids can be easily shaped as they immediately take the form of their containers... Then, I become a sea. The sea can be seducing as well as monstrous. Can you capture the sea? The sea can flood the earth surrounding her and shape the rocks limiting her.

Ants

According to psychology the view of ants and their busy nests allude to everything in-fernal, to the things hidden deep into the soul, the things well concealed from the view of the world.It is evident the reference to the uncon-scious and especially to the internal power that the ants suggest.In the same way the soil is being plowed and the earth’s nutritional elements, for the growth of plants, are being brought in surface, the individual’s personality is being stimulated and its elements are get-ting stirred. As a result the individual discovers new creative juices in order for its personality to spread its roots and to develop*.

* Aldo Carotenuto, “L’anima delle donne”, 2001

My Greek identity

Can we really free ourselves from our roots? Can we no longer be dependent on the cul-tural determinisms, the visual and mental reflexes of the social group in which we were born, the forms and ways of life that are etched in our memories?I have to admit that my effort to cause certain of my identities to coexist makes me suffer. Parts of my Greek roots cause me untreatable pain.What does it mean today to be a Greek? De-spite the fact that what it means to be a Greek living in Greece has little to do with what it means to be a Greek living abroad, there is a common place in the Greek atti-tude.For many Greeks who live in Greece, I am not considered to be a Greek anymore. They claim that I do not live among them and therefore I cannot understand and show empathy for them.For many Greeks in my hosting country, I am not considered to be Greek enough either; unless if, I go on following the Greek tasks of everyday life in my current physical and cultural environment that doesn’t resemble Greece at all.But isn’t the act of freeing oneself from the weight of national traditions the means to combat the symbolic house arrest*?

* Nicolas Bourriaud, “The Radicant”, chapter: Global art or art of capitalism

Isn’t it true as Nicolas Bourriaud mentions that many contemporary artists are being critical against their countries and they do not maintain polite relations with their national or regional cultures?

The plural identities of a place

The train brings me three times a week to the central station of Utrecht. This is an immense public space. Here one encounters several contradictory aspects that charac-terize almost every central junction being used by big populational groups.For the particular square of Jaarbeursplein, which, is part of Utrecht’s centraal sta-tion, we were asked to develop visual proj-ects.My plan is to visualy represent the plural and often contradictory identities of the area.Using my pocket digital camera I make photo notes of the area. I choose to shoot parts of the buildings, the constractions, the objects, the people around. Afterwards I will print posters out of these pictures and I will mount them on big boards. I plan to bring these boards in the square of Jaarbeursplein and to invite the passers-by to participate and to give shape to a construction which will combine the plural aspects of this area... Apart from all the people needed to design and develop public spaces, I think that it is the permanent and temporary users who shape the identity of these places day by day.Wandering around the Jaarbeurs square I no-tice that the amount of information is over-welming and often cluttering. I use my

photographic lense to isolate parts of what-ever surrounds me, may be in an attempt to understand little by little what happens. To create some meaning of the place and its order.Buildings frame the space around the square. The station-shoping center, the Hoog Katha-rijn parking building, the cubic Beatrix’s theater, the chamber of commerce and across the road Jaarbeurs’ expo-center, a banks’ headquarters and large offices’ buldings.Modern as well as dated buildings dominate the space. Constructions built with the lat-est technologies scrape the sky whith their pointed edges. Next to them darker, bulky buildings travel you to former decenias. Their facades, dull and worn out wait either to be renovated or give their place to newer constructions. In the middle of all these, the bus station with busses coming and going, passengers be-ing picked up and let off, their silhouettes mirrored on the vehicles’ windows as well as on the windows of the nearby shabby dinner kiosk, this mirroring marking their tempo-rary presence in the station environment.Opposite to the dinner kiosk Beatrix’s the-ater, named after the queen of the Nether-lands, proudly declares its presence. In front of its shiny darkened glass windows lies a sea of bicycles. In contrast to the theater the bicycles and their parking area lack care. Most of them are in a bad con-dition, their colors faded, them missing wheels or steers. On the filthy ground among them lie all shorts of bits and pieces while some young wild flowers sprout timidly.

In Dutch territory, where almost everything, things and population included, is ordered, well organized and monitored, these wild flowers continue to escape control. These wild flowers together with the abandoned and stolen bikes, the vagrant musicians in front of the station’s escalators, the pieces of garbage scattered around manifest the other aspect of this place’s identity,This other side is messy, filthy, dark, shad-owy, and risky. It contradicts the neat and ordered environment that some would prefer to see.Both aspects manifest the presence of dif-ferent users in this public area and also the way they perceive, treat and shape pub-lic space.The users themselves differ a lot but they have to try ways to accept and/or tolerate one another in order to coexist.If in our era of globalization and mobil-ity public spaces such as airports and train stations become our temporary homes, if this way our respective private spheres are be-ing brought into the public, then in what extent, us the users, do we perceive public space as our borderless home? In what extent do we accept and tolerate the others as our “flat mates” in these borderless homes?

This is not the end The fundamental requirement of an ethics of diversity is to travel in order to get back to oneself.The more I travel the more I enrich my iden-tity construction with the new identifica-tions I make.Through my voyages I meet different places, different people and by discovering them I discover and accept my own different as-pects. My voyages, not only do they travel me to different places but also to the different aspects of myself.I began my inner travels in a young age. At the same age I used drawing to represent my-self in the form of a cycle. Drawing is the first visual means through which very young children express their perception of themselves. They don’t even need drawing materials, they can leave their circular traces on the sand or they can draw with their wet hands. Drawing is one way to express our personality without using lan-guage. All of us draw with one or the other way when we are children. Some among us continue this practice for the rest of our lives. In my present situation I keep using draw-ing in order to represent myself, the plu-ral identifications I make, my home and my wished destinations, all of them fueled with the memories of my past. My drawings are now much more articulated than the cycle and the

house of my childhood. Often I realize that my environments as well as I are getting too complicated. Then I choose to combine my drawings and other visual representations, into installations.When my installations take the form of a house they can represent among other things my home and myself.My travels begin from home and end back home but may be home is not the same place al-ways neither has it the same form. May be my homes just like my identities are plu-ral. Home can be simultaneously my childhood home, my present home, my country of origin, the country were I currently live.May be home is every stop in the archipela-gos of my travels.Home I call every place where my identities can grow.