For our house is our corner of the world. –Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1964.
The “domestic goods” theme has opened room for more probing discourse about how silence speaks through our interiors, objects, and keepsakes. How can we grieve, memorialize, and challenge the archive of domesticity, interiority, and its objects as we navigate from personal to political? Conversations about kinships and identities can move back and forth through time: an item may first be framed as inanimate and mundane, then as a cherished heirloom, and then inhabit authorized space as a museum artifact.