Owning a human body is a universal [and highly personal] experience.
We’re interested in sharing these stories.
home/body project explores the experience of living in a human body: culturally, socially, communally, and individually. The goal of the home/body project is to heighten awareness about the importance of the physical self as a means of deepening our understanding of emotional, mental, and physical relationships and health.
Personal narrative and story telling are at the foundation of this exploration. Our bodies carry our history – in muscle memory, learned physical behaviors and mannerisms, and adopted movement affectations. Within our bodies dwell fragments of our parents and grandparents, childhood friends, traumas, accomplishments, injuries, and expectations. Often emphasis is placed on the mind alone when discussing emotion, knowledge, and memory. This division and consequent disconnect between body and mind, as well as the idea that human living space is external to one’s physical self, is the impetus for the development of home/body project. We maintain that your body is your home.
In the spirit of Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of the United States, we wish to excavate the history of our relationships with our bodies through time and across cultures.
In the spirit of Louis ‘Studs’ Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, we believe that the every day relationships that we as humans have with our bodies are a fairly unexplored territory, ripe for discovery and discourse.
In the spirit of Bill T Jones’ Still Here, we wish to unearth not only how we view mortality, but how we view the physical human condition – individually and in the context of community.
In the spirit of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues, we contend that every body part [hands, knees, hips, shoulders, abdomen, etc.] has a story to tell. We embody our history, in muscle memories, manerisms passed down through generations, and in the very nature of how we are taught to view our bodies.