Ideas of Home We, the family, were simple; the three of us, simple We have no quarrel with the world, no quarrel with people. we just want to get together   Yang Jiang, We Three   I longed to return to my native place. These two totems were to remind me always of where | come from and who I am at my core Bell Hooks ‘Belonging, A Culture of Place   Odysseus, the hero of Homer's epic has been wandering for years through trials and temptations, and it is the thought of returning home that sustains him and enables him to overcome all his trials and resist all temptations. Finally. when the goddess Calypso urged him to stay on her island for good, he resisted. I know noble princess that my wife is dwarfed by your splendour. That you will live Forever, that she is doomed to die.  Yet, I miss home every day and want to return. Guaping Zhou Home     Brief

This project explores the universality in the idea of home by looking at similarities in the way it is expressed, across language barriers, using gesture. It takes its inspiration from the work of physical theatre company Studio Dv8, where the Inclusion of gestures alongside verbally narrating a text emphasises the visual in parallel with sound. In sign language sound is replaced with Images. So, in the series Can we talk About ThIs?  the audience Is emotionally mobilised not only through hearing but also in ways use the entire body movements, postures, and so on.     I wanted to explore the idea of gestural communication by exploring the way the work home is communicated in various cultures. Having collected expressions of home in different languages, I found that despite the  differences in language and region, there is still a highly similar gesture, for the notion of home; similar to the roof or with the wall. If we continue to dig into the meaning behind this. In Chinese sign language, for example. a thumb pressed into the lips and lightly touched twice is home, as the lips represent the parents (there is an unofficial claim that the first two words babies learn in Chinese mum and dad, pronounced with the upper and lower lips touching). The project plays with these different gestures capturing each as a sequence of stills which individually and collectively describe the ideal of home.