Written by Eleni Tzirtzilaki

The ‘Home as a Fabric’ project concerns the contemporary fragile and transforming concept of ‘home’, and the way it is connected to the fabric, literally and metaphorically.

Home, today, seems to be fragile, fluid, transparent, transforming, just like fabric. Home as a place of wishes, perfumes, love, memories, dreams. Home as a hidden, silent, disturbed, vulnerable, indebted, illegal space. The concept of home is literally a house, but also a community, a country, a place in which one feels safe and accepted.

The project examines habitation within the contemporary conditions of displacement and de-territorialization. The methodology used here emerged through meetings–performances in various places, turned into familiar and welcoming spaces. During these actions–encounterings, women sit in circles and meet each other, discuss, and answer, marking their answers on colorful pieces of paper, or even orally, specific questions. They also offer each other pieces of fabric. During these encounterings, relationships develop, but also networks

that link women living under different conditions, women of various ages, professions, nationalities; women that have usually little―if any―chance to exchange experiences between them.

‘Home as a Fabric’ has, up to now, taken place twice in my working-space in Psyrri, in collaboration with Sevie Tsampalla; in the garden of the Athens School of Fine Arts, for ‘BBQ 2017’; in the headquarters of the Association of Architects, in collaboration with Maria Mantzari and the artist Javier Perez Aranda. In December 21, 2018, in collaboration with the Urban Motifs Lab, material by various creators was presented in the form of a performance–workshop, in the ex-shop of Diplari st. The pieces of fabric offered were sewn by the women themselves, collectively, in June 2019. Following that, the ‘fabric–house’ created became a silent walking in Sifnos island, having as final destination the historical settlement of Castro.