As started from Vermoortele’s personal collection of textual fragments and images, Houd me huis is an intimate and reflective work spiced with a healthy habitual self-questioning. Perhaps in not as many words, it illustrates and challenges the meaning of a home on an existential level, without necessarily providing us with the desired answers.

Fascinated by the concepts that should initially define a house or a home, Vermoortele considers them a metaphor for human beings. From the outside, one cannot detect all the things happening behind those lacy curtains, as cleverly suggested in her images.

© Jietske Vermoortele

 

They unveil and withhold us information at the same time. While miles away from the popular proverb ‘Home is where the heart is’, she prefers to associate material and immaterial meanings with its rather unclear definition. A home can refer to a body as something that never fully gives away its secrets at a single glance. A home can indicate the roots from which we set our compass and where one never stops searching for a certain balance.

That notion of meanings as a fluid instead of fixed matter is represented in the play’s entirety: from Léonard’s lacy textile objects, through projections of the anterior windows, to a more sensory approach in the texts that e.g. plays with ideas of familiarity. Fancy a piece of apple pie? In rhyming banality with the big universal questions in life, Houd me huis allows a more intuitive process and consequently triggers interaction with the public in a world where imagination, not a preconceived concept, prevails.

© Leontien Allemeersch