Esse arts + opinions is a bilingual contemporary art magazine publishing primarily critical analyses and essays on current artistic practices. Submissions for the thematic section (1,500 to 2,000 words) must be sent in DOCX or RTF format to [email protected] by January 10, 2027. Please include a short biographical notice (35 words) as well as your e-mail and mailing address. Persons wishing to first submit a note of intent (250-500 words) are invited to do so before October 1, 2026. No notes of intent will be read after this date, but it is still possible to submit a final text by the issue deadline (January 10, 2027).

Please consult the editorial policy and the writing protocol before submitting your text.

From hygge, or cozy, as an aesthetic categories or well-being practices to a place where domestic violence is inflicted, a house is far from being a simple habitation. It is fundamentally related to concepts and experiences of desire, loss, memory, belonging, and justice. The philosopher Gaston Bachelard goes so far as to propose that the house is “one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams” of humankind.^[1] In what ways do artists today explore the aesthetic and epistemological values of home?

In the contemporary imagination, the home may be idealized as warm, welcoming, and hospitable or perceived as fragile, fragmented, even impossible. On the one hand, a house may become a refuge, protecting against loss or violence. It also bears the traces of experiences, intimacy, and relationships with others, even as its form and configuration leave their marks on its occupants. Aside from its symbolic and metaphorical value, the house may be analyzed for its role in daily life, an area that is currently an expanding critical field.

On the other hand, the house is a precarious place, shedding light both on numerous inequalities and on the material instability of some structures (for example, Japanese paper houses, favelas, tent encampments). Artists today take up these questions when they explore how issues such as lockdowns, housing crises, power relations between owners and renters, exile, war, and disease inevitably change not only where we can live but also how we inhabit a place. The sociologist Avtar Brah proposes, in this regard, that we can be at home without feeling at home, as displacement is both identity-related and physical.^[2] Houses thus encompass an entire range of meanings and connotations; the heim (home) in Unheimlich opens to all the possibilities that they contain in terms of both the familiar and the disquieting.

Given such ambivalence, we can take into consideration the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, who sees the house as a mediator of human experiences and proposes to reassess it as a potential incubator for social and economic transformation.^[3] From this perspective, the house and its configurations are closely tied to issues such as family systems, heritage laws, and traditional expectations of domesticity such as women’s labour and love relationships. Even artists whose works unmake or deconstruct the house often address home as a place of aspiration or hope. For instance, an exploration of relational architecture or of the critical potential of hospitality may assert the regenerative power of new sorts of habitation.

Today, almost a hundred years after Virginia Woolf’s A Room of her Own (1929) was published and more than fifty years after Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s foundational exhibition Womanhouse (1972) took place, it seems particularly important to investigate feminist variations of the house in contemporary art. Whereas some artists point out and critique daily instances of power inequalities and patriarchal violence, others propose strategies for reconstructing or rehabilitating/reinhabiting a home that is more equitable, just, and inclusive. Following the feminist theoretician bell hooks, in art the “homeplace” may become a site of radical resistance.^[4]

Whether it is examined as a metaphor for the body, a manifestation of economic and social volatility, or the archive of a life, the house is both a concrete space that provides shelter and a more abstract figure that is not limited to the walls around us. Under what conditions does a structure become a house? How can a dwelling be transformed into a home? How should we understand the often-painful experience of house hunting, of having to reconstruct a home, and relatedly, of leaving one house for another? How should we understand the aesthetic and social issues of the home in a world swept by ecological and humanitarian crises (including being unhoused, migration, and war) even as social networks bombard us with images of pleasant cocoons, home decor, and luxurious renovations?

For this issue, Esse arts + opinions invites authors to examine the complexities, shifts, and paradoxes of the idea of home, and to explore the concept of the house, with all its familiarity and instability.

Consult the editorial policy and the writing protocol.

^[1] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 6.
^[2] Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora:  Contesting Identities (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).
^[3] Emanuele Coccia, Philosophy of the Home: Domestic Space and Happiness, trans. Richard Dixon (New York: Penguin, 2024).
^[4] bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990).