The Lines of our Heimat

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In collaboration with Ximena Gutiérrez

Workshop, 2019

We designed a two-day drawing workshop and invited international students from Bauhaus-Universität Weimar to share and reflect about how our identities are shaped by the territories and communities we come from.

At the beginning of the workshop we were all together in an empty space surrounded by not-for-long-white walls, with a few pieces of charcoal to make our traces, and tea and cookies for sharing. As Paul Klee suggested, we took our lines for a walk [1] and while we travelled and explored the room, our drawn lines crossed. We encountered other landscapes, cultures and languages and found out we all have similar unresolved questions about where we come from. 

Several lines, some harder than others, arrived and invaded unapologetically. Suddenly a line was made to divide the “us” from the “others”, establishing power relations among us. Some of us weren’t allowed to cross over the border, but this didn’t stop creative solutions to appear and transgress against the new boundary. Our landscapes changed and our paths were disrupted but we resisted. It seems like rebelling against powerful lines is a very human thing to do. We all wanted to inhabit the space freely and finally agreed to open the border.

On the second day, new paths erased the old ones, and our history was being washed away. In spite of the efforts made to erase our journeys, our collective memory persisted; the walls were never white again. Eventually, we tied together our bodies with tape and traveled creating new traces. We committed to new ways of inhabiting the space and every individual movement became a collective action. Struggling with movement was evident and inevitably the bodies revolted, breaking free from the bindings. We then sat down at the table and ate some cookies while reflecting on our experiences and imagining our ideal communities.

Special thanks to the participating students:

Benazir Basauri Torres

Yu-Ting Lu

David Müller

Yasemin Yagci

Molly Lun

Weiru Tai

Quan Zhou

Parva Zahed

1. Klee, P. (1961) Notebooks, vol.1: The Thinking Eye, ed. J.Spiller, trans. R. Manheim, London: Lund Humphries.