Objects, memories, and storytelling: experiments in narrating ideas of home

How do objects narrate the past, the everyday, and interrogate im/possible futures? How do they undo our ‘ideas of home’? What affects do they gather and what subjectivities and different forms of intimacy do they call into conversation? This compendium article brings a visual artist together with nine early career academics researching and archiving fragments from homes in Egypt, Sudan, and Palestine (and their global connections). In doing so the piece offers different practices of narrating and visualising stories of and from home. The article moves from bridges and infrastructure to food and clothes and walls. Through attending to these fragments, the authors invoke questions about the ways in which objects archive colonialism, resistance, revolts, neoliberalism, consumerism, dispersion, migration, and exile. At the core of the article is the visual artist Azza Ezzat’s creative interpretation of these nine stories, with a visual rendition that asks how fragments of home become interwoven aesthetically. Ezzat is an Egyptian visual artist whose practice relies on unpacking urban elements and recreating an alternative geography of urban space.