I will be doing a small rehearsal in Lesvos: To work on a tentative arts-based ethnographic project about creating new homes. It derives from my own practice of walking and talking to the landscape, and my experience that the place that was not my home (Kristiansand) has become so, partly because I have some places where I keep returning and feel at home. Concretely, one of them is here, a hill or small mountain that I return to every week all year, and where I talk to myself and the landscape and record my reflections:

A recent reflection is that this landscape, which I didn’t think too highly of at first, has welcomed me, and for that I am grateful. So it makes me feel at home in what was not my home, I keep returning to it, and I realize that I am grateful to the place that I slowly – very slowly – have come to see as my home.

In Lesvos I will meet different people who are not from the island, but who have made Lesvos their home. I will ask them if they, like me, have a place that they return to, which makes them feel at home. If they will take me there, I am grateful, and I will record the sound of it, their descriptions of it, and with the camera (I’m not too well versed with video) ask them to guide me as a cameraman. (This inspired by Siri Hermansen’s concept of being guided)

Maybe this will become something more than a rehearsal for myself, but that is what it is at the moment. I will send the material to the people that agree to share their places with me, and ask them again for approval before publishing anything.