Josh recently helped his mother move out of the house his father built in Princeton, NJ in 1960. Breathing life into family artifacts dating back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 1860s, engaging the land where he was born one more time, contending with numerous old and often difficult stories calling out for attention, and capturing over 3500 photos, (only 350 of which are found below) Josh found creative ways to transform the experiences of loss into those of rebirth.
When Josh presented this work at The Esalen Institute and the Landscapes/Soulscapes Symposium in San Francisco in the Fall of 2011, he began by initiating somatic explorations with the group, attempting to presence home in the room and in the bodies of the participants. Then, after taking the audience through his personal explorations, Josh connected his final encounters at home with the larger experience of solastalgia, a feeling which accompanies the loss of an individual or community’s home, losses which often occur in much more devastating ways.
For climate migrants and the increasing number of displaced peoples around the world, the questions of how to transform these relationships to home are critical. More on this can be found in Josh’s more recent talk Climate Migrants and Solastalgia: Transforming Homes of the Displaced and Disconnected.
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