Karin Bar

What is a home? Is it your loved ones in the same room or the walls that surround them. Is it the ownership of the land or the mental stability that a home provides. I saw my neighborhood homeless guy everyday in the past two years, sitting in the sun or snow with the small cardboard sign that says "mama said they will be days like that...", for him everyday is just another day. I've searched for a home all my life without even knowing that home is not a house or a backyard. Home is not those walls that protect you, home is not where you feel safer and home is not what you protect. Home is where the art is.

You can run away from home, break a home, build a home. But you don't want to be homeless. You don't want to lose hope, give up and see no future. Or maybe you do? Homelessness is also being free, released from society rules, unbounded to possess. I left my home a few times, but I moved out when I met him, with him I built  a home. And ever since home is where he is. I never felt that connection to the walls, not even the western wall. Not even to my bedroom wall, but now after I left home, the country not the walls, I'm homeless. I rent an apt, I made it a home, but home is where my heart is and my heart has a mind of his own. After spending the last week in hotel rooms, I felt at home. Note to myself - Art works in hotel rooms and Dr offices are a cheap trick to make you feel at ease, at Home.

Music is home, a good old tune will make you feel at home, music was always my safe place. "... If there is love in a house, it's a palace for sure..."-  wrote Tom Waits in House where nobody lives, That song was playing on repeat by my next door neighbor in 119 Christopher St. 6 floors, walk up, shitty apartment, I called home. 

It must have begun when she left home, before I was born. She took the road less traveled back in 1977, then being a rebel meant that you had something to rebel against.  She made a home for us where ever we gave way, she made us move 16 houses in 18 years, so you understand why the home is a vague and raw concept for me.  Where we came from, home is the land, home is what you protect with your life. Till death. My homeland is always questioned. As a second generation in a country that is younger than my grandmother, surrounded by so called enemies and what not, I grow up in the smallest place that causes the loudest noise in the world. I think we are all homeless. We own a house on a land that might be taken away, so what is a home without a land? Pipe dream and lucid reality. What is a home when the land is mad and shaking? Disaster. 

Home today is where my iPhone is, don't laugh!  I have my music, my photographs, my books and my games all in a small device, when he is with me anywhere can be called a home.  This is what we've become, We fight for our virtual space, that cloud that contains our memories and the freedom to access it.  Home concept has shifted in the past 100 years, we are not the human beings we used to be.  But we still extend to war for religion, land and ego. We destroy homes in the name of god, in the name of money. We lose homes by forces of nature, we demolish history to build new over old and forget that used to be someones home.