Performing Homescapes - Sally Mackey

Part of the Performing Landscapes series, Performing Homescapes is an edited collection comprising a contemporary exploration of performing many iterations of landscapes of homes. Authors were invited to respond to a detailed brief with home to be deliberately reconsidered as homescape, represented by landscapes, sites and practices often outside, and occasionally including a conventional home-as-house and intimate dwelling. We wanted a diverse range of geographical sites to be represented and a global offer, encompassing a pluriverse of homescapes. Voices, practices, and epistemologies from the Global South and global majority were important to us, including Indigenous ways of knowing and practicing. This curated collection offers an expanded understanding of the performance of home/scapes as a new intervention into the fields of performance and home scholarship.

Performing Homescapes moves beyond spatial meditations within rooms of a house to offer an original critical engagement with the social, political, ecological and cultural landscapes that shape and sustain affects related to the notion of home, unhomeliness and, even, solastalgia. While the impact of the social, political and cultural landscapes on relationships with - and within - the house are implied in most academic literature on forms of performing home, it is foregrounded in the chapters of this edited collection. In addition, certain chapters attend to the more-than-human, human relationships with the Earth as homescape and the co-creation of homescapes within and beyond dwellings.