Poetics of Home:
ghosts, traces, longing & belonging

Home – whether it refers to loss of home, home as safety, home as danger – has a bearing on our mental states, often in enduring ways. In collaboration with Andrew Whiteman from Canadian band Broken Social Scene, I am working on an electronic music and lyric essay project that explores the connection between sound, urban landscapes and interior landscapes. It attends to the physical spaces we inhabit – including the sensorial, relational, and historical dimensions – and consider how we map them onto the psyche and body. The project documents states of dislocation, un/belonging, nostalgia, liminality and yearning that arise with departures, arrivals, and the daily process of laying down footprints on the ground, memories in the mind and imprints in our cells. It also considers how models of the brain can influence musical form. This work is funded by the Canada Council for the Arts.