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To write about the contemporary is always to respond to a certain urgency — not the urgency of headlines, but the subtle insistence that something in the present demands our attention. Some questions return again and again, and among them, none feels more pressing than this: what does it mean to have a, or to call something, home?

Now, more than ever, the meaning of home feels unstable. A recent cross-cultural survey highlights the differences: in Northern Europe, home is understood as a private sanctuary; in the Middle East, it is tied to ancestry and communal identity; in parts of Asia, it is defined through multi-generational living and shared responsibility.

These contrasts show how fluid the concept can be — not only across cultures, but also across generations. For older ones, home is often synonymous with stability: a place to build, own, and eventually pass down. But for Millennials and Gen Z, raised online amid economic precarity, the rules of belonging have shifted. Connection happens in unexpected places, sometimes a digital space can feel more familiar than the city one lives in. As cultural sociologist Sherry Turkle observes, social media can feel like both a home and a hotel. Digital environments simulate intimacy: they appear lived-in, cozy, personal — yet remain performative and transient.

And perhaps this is where the meaning of home begins to blur — between the personal and the collective, the virtual and the physical. Our understanding of home also shapes how we connect to what’s happening in the world. Studies on journalism suggest that news feels “closer to home” when there’s some kind of proxmity, geographic, cultural, or emotional. But in the years since the pandemic, that sense of closeness has started to fray. Many societies feel more divided than ever, and people are finding it harder to identify with one another, even when they share the same space or background. It’s probably no coincidence then that news disassociation and outright avoidance are on the rise. The less we feel rooted, the harder it becomes to care about what’s happening beyond our own immediate “home”.

Belonging, after all, is not only a feeling but a narrative. It draws the first maps, marks the boundaries of imagination, and gives names to landscapes. When these stories are disrupted, the sense of home fractures. Projects such as Forensic Architecture remind us that maps are never static records, but living documents — tools that can both obscure and restore our sense of home, just as memory does on a smaller scale.

Even when undone, home endures in fragments: a song, a recipe, an accent that survives the shift of language. These traces remind us that home is never only a place, but a movement between the tangible and the imagined: between streets and stories, gestures and memories. Belonging is not fixed; it is redrawn each time we reach out, remember, or find our way back to one another.

So what whispers to you of home: a place, a sound, a moment, or perhaps the people you find along the way?

Estelle, Anna, Sanjna

Some numbers

Read between the lines

	Navigating Displacement: Mapping Exile and Memory Along Artistic Routes — Rahiem Shadad, NO NIIN (2025) Through maps, memories, and creative detours, Sudanese artist Rahiem Shadad explores how artists turn displacement into an act of reorientation.
	‘I Wanted to Have Something to Give My Daughter From Gaza’. Escaped Palestinian women tell the stories of the few relics they have of home. — Danya Issawi, The Cut (2025) Palestinian women recount what they carried when leaving Gaza, and what those few items now mean.
	Home truths: 15 essays on the meaning of home — Yaroslav Trofimov, Nina Yashar, Rebecca Wesson Darwin, Simon Bouvier Monocle (2024) A mosaic of short reflections where architects, writers, and curators unpack what “home” means today — from scent and light to belonging and loss.

Ways to get inspired

We Are Not Numbers This youth-driven initiative empowers Palestinian writers, to tell the stories behind the statistics and to turn headlines into human voices.

peoplemov An interactive data-visualisation project showing global migration flows making visible the scale and patterns of movement in the modern world.

Refugee Hosts An interdisciplinary research project tracing the stories, soundscapes, and writings of Syrians who found refuge in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.

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To explore how the idea of home takes shape after displacement, we spoke with Natalia Lepori, trained in international law and human rights, now completing her apprenticeship and working across contexts of migration and protection.

In your experience, what helps people rebuild a sense of belonging after displacement?

Belonging and home, as I’ve seen through the stories of friends and their experiences of migration or relocation — whether for many years or just a few — are things that take shape over time. Moving means confronting a new language, a different culture, unfamiliar smells, tastes, and habits. But perhaps more deeply, it means encountering a different way of understanding life itself — relationships, time, dignity, destiny, and even God. A sense of belonging is something intimate and changeable. It doesn’t depend only on geography, language, or external markers, but grows from personal experience — from the bonds we build and the recognition we receive from others. For some, it comes quickly; for others, it requires time and daily gestures. For many, it remains incomplete, suspended between places and contexts.

Stories of belonging

Through stories exchanged with others, Natalia has come to see that home is not a place but something that takes shape in relation to others and the world around us.

AMIN, a dear friend from Senegal, often recalls with a smile that when he first arrived in Italy ten years ago, he never looked older people in the eyes — in his culture, that’s a gesture of respect, but in Italy it was misunderstood as indifference. Building relationships was a constant challenge, not least because of racism. Over time, he found work, friends, and a stable daily life. Yet belonging still escapes him: in Italy he feels Senegalese, and when he returned to Senegal for a few weeks after many years, he discovered he was seen as a foreigner. It’s a feeling many people with a migratory background share — being “neither from here nor there,” belonging to two worlds without fully feeling part of either.

DANIEL, a close friend from Eritrea, says his sense of belonging arrived gradually — learning the language, getting to know the culture, working as a cook in a traditional Swiss restaurant, and building friendships. Step by step, Switzerland became home.

VERONICA, a Swiss friend who has lived in England for several years, says that for her, feeling part of a place means meeting it through living culture — going to the theatre, concerts, seeing the reactions and expressions of others. It’s through encountering what’s different, what reveals something new about herself, that she feels a place becoming part of her story, and she part of it.

What does “home” mean to you?

For me, home is made of belonging — of people who walk alongside me. It has no walls, no brick foundations, and no fixed geography. It’s a place where I can keep growing, being fully myself.

Plugged in

Brown History A sprawling collective of photographs, letters, and forgotten stories that sketch the South Asian diaspora beyond borders.

The Korean Archives Fragments of language, food, and identity: small testimonies that piece together a living archive of Korean diasporic life.

Indian Memory Project Part archive, part storytelling experiment: family photographs become portals into untold histories.

Through art

A photographic homecoming to Bahrain — Ali Al Shehabi, 2025 The photographer left Bahrain as a baby. Upon his return as an adult, he used the lens as a means to explore how he felt about his native land.
Vietnamese Immigrating Garden — Tuấn Mami (Nhà Sàn Collective), 2022 At documenta 15 in Kassel, artist Tuấn Mami created a garden of plants native to Vietnam from seeds donated by Vietnamese immigrants to Germany. These plants are often considered contraband by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture.
Dear Laila — Basel Zaraa When his five-year-old daughter started asking him about the place he grew up in, Palestinian aritst Basel Zaraa started constructing a model of his childhood home in the Palestinian refugee camp Yarmouk.

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