What is home?

Home is the point from where you look to a horizon and dream about where you want to go. I dreamed about dozens of possible future homes for over sixteen years while watching the Southern horizon which also happened to be my backyard.

I thought that behind this horizon the world was turning faster, or even actually turning. Behind the trees exciting things were happening, life, as opposed to me sitting behind the kitchen window which felt like nothing had ever moved a centimeter.

My perception as a child is obviously saying more about my desperate need to move, or call it escape, than it says about my peaceful origin. I grew up in silence having a lot of space which at that time felt like too much of nothingness. I was too curious to what was behind the trees at the end of the land that I never enjoyed the land itself. I was only dreaming about a world trip to see the whole planet but at home we barely talked about anything outside of the borders of the twenty hectares farmland my parents once bought from their own parents.

Twelve years later I have collected quite an amount of horizons on a spectrum of 19.603 kilometers and have been moving between seventeen different homes. Balancing out the intensity of discovering is silence. It is a skyscraper metropolitan and the flat farming land that make the perfect alternation for my home. Both have the view of a horizon, one to calm down from overwhelmingness and one that inspires to look again what is behind.

At this point in life I might still not know what my home is, or how it should feel but I feel most comfortable when oscillating.

Interviewer: What do you find in silence?

LM: I love silence. I find it habituating and soothing. It’s the way I grew up, it’s the way I function best. It’s what I like. I had to be trained out of it because you can’t be a partner to another person and never want to talk! As a family, we did more mental telepathy than talking. Is it even possible to say that we didn’t talk? As far as I can remember, we didn’t. So I find it fascinating that people can sit and talk. This interview isn’t difficult for me, but don’t sit down and try to talk with me casually. Do you know what I mean?
— Linda Montano