TO ·BE·LONGING Portraits of Queer Living

The home is often understood as the physical manifestation of one’s identity, a space shaped by the longing for reprieve from societal expectations. Historically defined by rigid heteronormative ideals of domestic life, the reproduction of these models concretizes a universal, and often restrictive, understanding of what a home should be. ‘TO ·BE·LONGING: Portraits of Queer Living’ seeks to shift this dominant social narrative, steering the focus away from queer trauma and institutional struggle toward a nuanced reality of queer domesticity, belonging, and resilience.

As an immersive spatial experiment, it prompts a dissolution of fixed boundaries and an iterative rethinking of the conventional rigidities of the “home.” Engaging with the temporality of one’s own identity, it seeks to demonstrate the potential for continuous change in the space one inhabits, highlighting the possibilities and nuances of designated spatial functions, and contrasting them with the comfort one seeks in exposure or concealment.

At the core of this project is an assemblage of queer memory, identity and culture. Having collected nearly 40 artifacts from community members across North America, these items seek to define what ‘queer living’ looks like today at the scale of the object. These intimate artifacts are featured against the backdrop of an adaptive possibility, illustrating how variability and embodiment reflect one’s position within a space.

Visitors are invited to engage, re-shape, and re-make the possibilities of home through fluidity, possibility, and intimacy beyond the norm. By exploring the subversion of domesticity through the tectonics of the day-to-day, the experience prompts reflection on one’s own position and unconscious biases regarding acts of exposure and intimacy within a shared space.

The project simultaneously functions as a living archive and a critical exploration of the spaces we inhabit and the chosen families we build, demonstrating that understanding queerness actively engages subjectivity as a means for spatial critique.