POV: A Home of Alterity

Abstract

Challenging the idea of “home” as a safe refuge, or an enclosure of stability, this article explores ways in which home can be envisioned as an ontological space of becoming, where life is always risked. “POV: A Home of Alterity” is conceived within a deconstructivist theoretical framework and asks the question of how home can be perceived as an open text—a locus of oscillation between inside and outside—for the purpose of revealing home as an inherently traumatic “event,” which presupposes an openness to absolute alterity. To show the traces of otherness in one’s experience of being present (at home), it examines a photograph from Julia Borissova’s project DOM: Document Object Model and sets out to interrogate the concept of “home” through three relationships wherein it emerges: (1) between inside and outside, (2) between the I and the other, and (3) between the I and oneself. Consequently, this article seeks to define home as a representational space of one’s own alterity, where one surrenders to one’s non-coincidence with oneself and hence to experience itself, ultimately revealing that, in an aporetical way, home encrypts the very dislocation it “promises” to shield from.