James Ro
Georgia Traganou
2010 April, 26
‘Object and Place’: A Response to ‘Homes and Routes’
So far, we have taken the rather passive role (I say this quite harshly) in matter of applying ‘Homes and Routes’ onto this project. As I have mentioned in the morning seminar of last week’s class, that there were two givens, ‘Homes and Routes’ and an exhibition – that the challenge was to fit ‘Homes and Routes’ into an exhibition with students – is a rather inappropriate way to think of design. It is critical that we not only review the outline of ‘Homes and Routes’ again but to restructure how this exhibition has been presented to us, so that ownership is to us, the studio, and not to an outside force that had landed its will, and we its executors. The outline set in ‘Homes and Routes’ is not the law of Moses, brought down from Mount Sinai given to us. We must (it is important that we do this) find an argument, a scope from where we can say that ‘Homes and Routes’ is our own development.
How can we do this while staying true to Traganou’s intensions of ‘Homes and
Routes?’ Part of the work has been completed for us by the students of LoMA. Ask them what a home is or a route is, they will answer with assertion. There is a specific way that this notion has developed. ‘Homes and Routes’ are a universal notion that is innate to us all. This is not because there is a common consensus of what these things may mean. This is not because there is a shared definition of these things. And, even if there are, which there are, it does not explain the differences in views that ‘Homes and Routes’ has taken.
There is a universal notion of ‘Homes and Routes’ here. The representation of ‘Homes and Routes’ has been conventionally thought of with the LoMA students. ‘Object and
Place’. This is where we are headed. We have asked the students to come up with objects and identity their relationship to the home or the route through an object. We have managed quite spontaneously and it has worked favorably. We should now be conscious of our intensions and develop them further. This stance from where we are thinking, telling and making through the object to reveal a place is an exciting notion.
‘Object and Place’ identifies our current direction and the evolution of ‘Homes and Routes’ with LoMA students. From the initial conception of the object in our direction for our incipient lesson, we have lead our lessons thinking about the places through objects. We are creating and developing narratives, personal and even impersonal and fabricated ones. We are therefore constructing new objects for the exhibition itself. ‘Object and Place’ includes our work on the found/personal objects, which our lessons have been so much a foundation which we focus on, with ‘Homes and
Routes’ in proper perspective. What is the link between objects and ‘Homes and Routes,’ has been the overarching question in each of our lessons. It is negligent to discount that the object does not play a principal role in our development of the lesson plans. ‘Object and Place’ is thus a more accurate account of this studio, although ‘Homes and Routes’ is relegated to mere places.
The notion of ‘place’ is an important one especially in nationalist discourse described in Saïd’s “Out of Place,” an autobiographical narrative of existing without a
‘home’ or nation. Rendering ‘Homes and Routes’ to ‘places’ does not reduce it of

meaning but enhances to the greater context of identity. ‘Places’ have a more significant implication then ‘Homes and Routes.’ ‘Homes and Routes’ ascribe permanence to a rather temporary and ephemeral ‘place.’ If the permanency of the moment is what we are after in ‘Homes and Routes,’ then we are disingenuous of the true goals of this project, which is to reflect the true nature of a “home” or “route.” For many the notions of these terms may not fit with conventional definitions. It is why ‘place’ is a more accurate term that encompasses our purposes and goals, and why we currently look at ‘objects.’
As for the object, I hope there can be a more ethnographically considerate approach. I feel that it is too late for a compromise, unfortunately.
In my talk of ‘places,’ it is difficult to hide Saïd’s notion of place, and the importance it served him. His home was probably in the many places he had lived throughout his life, but he would not say the Palestine was his home but merely the place where his father, and his father’s father, before him, lived and called home. If a wider discussion of identity is to be incorporated in this exhibition, then we should relegate ‘Homes and
Routes’ to ‘places.’ ‘Object and Place’ is undoubtedly the evolution from ‘Homes and
Routes’ and is more reflective of the current mode of thinking in our lessons when we say
‘Homes and Routes.’ Perhaps ‘Homes and Routes’ began with the notion of ‘Places,’ in mind. It is now important that we consider a term that will describe our work with the
LoMA students accurately.