What makes a place feel like ‘home’? How do we find our home in the world? How do we know when we are ‘home”?

This short video originated in one of the first sessions of the Digital Artists Collaborative of 3200 Stories.  We had spent the morning unpacking concepts of ‘place’ and ‘home’ as relates to terms like “local,” a contemporary catch word for preserving human values in the basic practices of daily life. Then we broke up into pairs and, in this case, trios, to collaborate on some expression of our ideas.

Masha Kouznetsova is an artist and illustrator; Laura Weinbach a songwriter and singer; and I, primarily a writer. Our conversation wandered a bit in the vastness of possibility, and eventually zoomed in on a little story about a formless entity that yearns for a sense of home to anchor itself in time and space. Eventually it meets another entity, and they recognize one another. They find that feeling at home in the world is not a matter of finding a particular place out there, but of connection to others. Place is not the thing – but rather, being. Because they now live in relation to one another – they are home.

What we created out of this idea is a fully produced song and a series of drawings that suggest what an animated film would look like. The video allows Laura’s plaintive song and Masha’s poignant sketches to “talk” to one another, hopefully drawing viewers into the dialogue.