This project is about being torn from one’s place.
This project is about the violence of war suffered in childhood and its repercussions on the construction of a being.
The resulting trauma is repressed, as the child always gives adults the impression of adapting.
Because of the war in Lebanon and my origins, I’ve been always on the move between East and West.
This project attempts to convey the emotion of being constantly forced to move away from one’s environment, one’s friends, one’s home, of having fear inscribed in the very depths of one’s being. You end up not knowing where you belong, while trying to fit in and be accepted in a new place.
“We left home… but what is home” draws on personal experiences of the past to raise collective questions about events of the present, and attempts to understand the future. More and more people will be affected by displacement, whether due to war or natural disasters caused by global warming.
The artwork presented here explore both formalism and autobiographical themes to raise more universal questions about notions of intermediate states, identity and belonging. Their subject matter revolves around notions of uprooting and attachment. I consciously use materials from different spheres – fine art, literature, construction work and applied arts – blurring the boundaries of perception between medium and material. My subjects are painfully political and reflexive, but I chose to treat them poetically and aesthetically, placing the personal within the universal.
This installation is being presented by galleries in Beirut, Paris and Stockhlom, these cities having been the stopping-off points for the various journeys I made as a child.
This project took root in me when, a few years ago, my two childhood homes were destroyed. This loss suddenly made me realize that the physical materiality of these places was all the more important as the war had forced me into repeated departures throughout my youth. I realized the extent to which they represented two pillars, deep points of attachment, whose foundations came to life on very specific lands. Their vanishing felt like yet another uprooting.
The building in Beirut had been constructed by my paternal grandfather in the 40s. A true work of architecture, with unprecedented volumes and cedar woodwork typical of the region. The whole apartment was bathed in light, thanks to high ceilings and blown-glass doors. Through the kitchen window, we could see the port and the sea, before Beirut was disfigured by the proliferation of new buildings.
In Sweden, our family home was my summer home. Situated by the sea on a peninsula, its garden jutted out into the sea. It had been designed by my maternal grandfather in the 50s, in a minimalist, avant-garde style of architecture. It has been imagined in osmosis with the exterior landscape of rocks, sky, sea, trees and the cry of seagulls. The exterior conversed beautifully with the interior.
These two houses were rooted in completely opposite locations, one in the south and the other in the north. Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea, Sweden and the Baltic Sea. However they shared transparency and luminosity. The day I lost them, I realized how fortunate I had been to grow up in such beautiful spaces.
These two houses no longer exist, but they continue to inhabit me, as I am unable to inhabit them myself.
Sara Badr Schmidt, February 2024