Home marks the alpha and omega point of existence: the origin in the body and the cyclical return in myth, in nature, in death. Kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and corridors become sacramental zones where intimacy, solitude, exposure, and connection are ritualized.
Yet home is not an innocent place. Home can be a site of structural injury, in which affects, norms, and exclusions sediment. The house is at once a place of care and of injury, of closeness and coercion, of domestic harmony and domestic violence. We flee the home, outgrow it, seek it anew, return to it. Home can be a prison or a refuge, a site of regression or a space of transformation. In mythologies around the world, the first home appears as a lost paradise, a state before separation, before the contradictory emergence of consciousness.
Within this mythological home, the dinner table appears as a site of confrontation. Where like in Richard Kerns film „I killed you first“ the scapegoat child is criticised, judged, degraded and ultimately pushed to lethal violence, reflecting the dynamics of conservative family systems that punish neurodivergent or queer children who do not fit parental ideologies. The dinner table becomes a crime scene. But what if you change the narrative and interfere with the lingering fear? Reclaim your body aka your soul’s home, learn to fight back, protect, channel that fear, that anger and learn to use it effectively, with all eight limbs. What if you transform the memories of this domestic space and split them apart to share with the public, like a cake at a birthday party?
This work is a testament to dysfunctional families and their toxic dynamics, but also a love letter to neuroplasticity and how the queer chosen family, cross disciplinary art
making and martial arts can heal us, so we can feel at home again in our bodies
Thank you
@thisfliss for activating my I HEALED YOU FIRST dinner table as my chosen family member of trust ❤️ ily
photo credit: Studio Tanu
@studio_tanu__ fundraiser T
@torte_bar_berlin for
@freeselfdefense 
