How to Be Home
Photential is pleased to present How to be Home, our first collaborative project with Spanish artist, Laura C. Vela. How to be Home is a collectible objet d’art designed by Vela inspired by a traditional deck of cards ( edition of 40 have been made). The collaboration expands on the ways we usually interact with photography and reflects on the idea of home and belonging.
Starting from the concept of home and the domestic space, the deck of cards bear photographs from Vela’s extraordinary project, Como la casa mía (2020), a photographic series featuring performer Xirou Xiao that investigates intimacy, home, everyday gestures and the feeling of belonging to a certain space. Currently, people are staying inside of their homes for historic and unending amounts of time. The relationships people have with objects is in constant flux and this shift in environment has begun to make seemingly everyday objects hold new significance. Suddenly, these ‘things’ have acquired an aesthetic and autonomous value that before, went unnoticed.
Vela’s deck of cards embraces this change. Keep them on a coffee table or build a classic house of cards. In understanding that the concept of ‘home’ has changed, Vela and Photential proposes that How to be Home gives collectors the ability to construct their own, new domestic spaces. Art can serve to be a home.
The house we live in may be large, small, with a single floor or with many floors. Dark with nooks and crannies, or bright with large open spaces. With a wooden floor that creaks when you walk or one of gleaming tiles. A home of your own or an inherited one, in passing or forever. The house we build, the one we are, may be the place where we begin to have our own name, where we begin to keep secrets or where we begin to dream. A place where we can save things from getting lost in time. A place where we will need others so that it does not collapse.
Laura C. Vela
Text and photos: Laura C. Vela
Drawings: Xirou Xiao
Design: Ntity
Craftsmanship: El sueño de Julia
Produced by Photential
