Home – No Home: Expatriation, Social Integration and Remote Viewing of place. An Expanded Photography Approach

Abstract

Home – No Home reflects through expanded photographic artworks and elucidate – through heuristic introspection, auto-ethnography, and critical text analysis – notions of expatriation and social integration, such as home, (Blunt & Dowling 2006; Blunt et al., 2007) home displacement and attachment, nostalgia (Vidler, 1992; Koerner, 2017) and homesickness (Fink et al., 2007). Attached to these concepts are deeper questions rooted in societal discourses about today’s global trends and discourses of expatriation, (Fechter, 2007; Leonard 2010; Walsh, 2010, 2012, 2014; Mathur, 2011; and Kunz, 2016) and the politics of border assertion and control. Is the ability to live abroad, in unfamiliar countries, a venture into pursuing present-day promised lands? If expatriation, or skilled-worker mobility, is a venture to paradises on earth, does it come without social and psychological baggage for the individual? Does repatriation (Chen & Morley, 2008) help in any way to alleviate them? In this paper, I consider these questions by offering a theoretical analysis of concepts such as home, home displacement and attachment, nostalgia, homesickness, self and its past and memory, along with creative work portraying them.