Project "What is Home?"

What is home?

The project What Is Home? is an ongoing artistic and literary project. It brings together visual art and poetry, personal memory and collective reflection / What Is Home? is an ongoing artistic and literary project that brings together visual art and poetry, personal memory and collective reflection.

The German word Heimat has no direct English equivalent. While it is often translated as home, its meaning reaches much further. It can describe a place, a landscape, a language, a community, a memory, or an inner sense of belonging. At the same time, the term carries a complex political and historical legacy in Germany, making it both deeply meaningful and deeply contested.

Home is a deeply charged concept. It lies at the heart of social and political debates, is often appropriated for ideological purposes, and carries profound emotional weight. Yet beneath all of this, it speaks to a fundamentally human longing: the desire to belong—to find a place, both in the world and within ourselves, where we can truly arrive.

This question has accompanied me since my youth. It emerged through my engagement with literature on exile, through conversations about flight and displacement, through the stories of my ancestors, and through my own long-standing, often nameless feeling of not quite belonging.

For me, the word home has always remained deeply ambivalent: shaped by history, burdened by misuse, yet impossible to abandon.

I believe we cannot leave the idea of home to those who seek to use it as a means of excluding others.

Rather than offering answers, this project invites questions. It is an attempt to make my own questions visible while leaving space for each person to discover what home might mean to them.

Questions that remain: 

  • Is home a place? 
  • Can home be lost? 
  • Can we have more than one home? 
  • Is home exclusive? 
  • Can you smell home? 
  • Is family home?
  • Should home be protected—or transcended?

Poem

I am a centipede
in every place
I have lived
a foot of mine

A foot for the places of my grandmothers
and grandfathers
ancestral feet

So I walk
unsteadily
on my many feet
a many-I
an everywhere-I
a nowhere-I

​

Nicola Heim 2022

I Am a Millipede

At every place
I have ever called home,
I left
one of my feet.

One foot
for the places
of my mothers
and fathers,
ancestral feet.

So I walk,
unsteady,
on my many feet—
a many selves,
an everywhere self,
a nowhere self.

​

Nicola Heim, 2022