Where do you come from?

This project is about a long reflection about the idea of home and how it influences people’s identity which began from the question “Where do you come from?” asked to me while studying in London. As I come from binational parents and never lived in one fixed place growing up, this question became hard to answer. I experimented through various methods to understand what home represents as a whole. My interest in urban spaces led me to study the physicality and boundaries of “home”. To do so, I conducted a series of interviews on Deptford High Street to study how a physical place such as a street could be a common ground for a community and therefore a home. I wanted to represent the diversity of Deptford’s community and showcase this idea that home is rather a journey than a place. I therefore recreated Deptford on Blender through 3d mapping through Google Earth. However, on certain alleys leaving the main road, the architecture slowly transforms into a place a certain individual lived in prior to living in Deptford. As the alley continues, the places keep transforming into the various places that led this person here. Through a couple of these narrated alleys, I hope to showcase this diversity within this same space that is Deptford High Street.

(Click on the numbers to see the map from different positions)

Process:

In order to make this giant world, I first interviewed passers by on Deptford High street which was not recorded as I wanted to create a conversation rather than an interrogation. Through this technique, not only was I able to pick up the location of where they came from, but also experiences, stories, relationships that they picked up on the road which sometimes they identified more as home than the location itself. That was the aim of my project: showcase that the identification mechanism to what someone calls “home” is extremely varied and is not necessarily tied to a physical place.

After the interviews, I decided to retrace the life of these local residents all the way to their final stop: Deptford. In order to do so, I collected all the Google Earth maps of the location through a software called Renderdoc. I then made a chronological collage on Blender in order to blend these different locations together and create a fluid transition visually but a sharp contrast in architecture. After the collage, I animated the camera to get through each place chronologically in order for me to narrate their story accordingly. I then added other elements mentioned in our conversations through mixed media such as a videographic process called datamoshing and an analogue machine to distort and bend footage, as shown here, called video synthesiser. I also downloaded a couple of Sketchfab models such as the cinema booth and the world globe.

The project was then published on the app Tethered Publics which explores small projects made in South East London in order to explore and conserve the area’s rich culture and diversity.

Daniele van Reusel

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Where do you come from?

Process:

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