I’ve Found a New Place to Be From

This exhibition is a reflection of my lived experience. I engage with the spatial, emotional, and symbolic dimensions of migration, asking what it means to construct “home” when the foundation of belonging is in motion. Through video, photography, and installation, I trace an autoethnographic path through motherhood, domesticity, identity, and the architecture of everyday life. Rather than seeking resolution, I embrace the fragmentary nature of memory and the performative character of becoming.

At the heart of this work are three interwoven conceptual scripts that help me understand the layers of disjuncture I’ve lived through: architectural, affective, and maternal.

I. Architectural Disjuncture: From Space to Place

The first disjuncture unfolded at the level of architecture — the transition from one home to another, from Belgrade to London, from known to unknown. Gaston Bachelard’s notion of the house as a “topography of intimate being” no longer holds (Bachelard, 1994). My dwelling — or perhaps more precisely, my habitus, as a lived and internalised spatial condition — ceased to be a fixed point (Bourdieu, 1977) and became a provisional, unstable frame — a space I had yet to conquer and make my own again.

The LED screen video installations act as sculptural witnesses to this transition: loops that resist narrative and instead present space as process — a container of breath, light, and gestures. Home became a body in flux. As Henri Lefebvre writes, space is socially produced, not merely inhabited (Lefebvre, 1991). I was now learning how to produce space again, from scratch.

II. Affective Disjuncture: The Geography of Care

The Polaroid photographs — analogue, soft-edged, immediate — speak to an affective disjuncture I continue to navigate. They document the slow, persistent act of making the foreign familiar. Toy Project shop, the missing tooth of my daughter, an old building in Archway, a double-decker bus — these are not grand narratives but micro-archives of presence. Through repetition and return, I map out what Judith Butler might call performative homemaking (Butler, 2004): the gestures and rituals that allow a space to be inhabited. My identity is not something I carry intact across space. It is enacted through these relational acts. 

I also think of Michel de Certeau’s idea that everyday life is a site of resistance (de Certeau, 1984) — in these small acts of placement and presence, I reclaim space. Because in my own home, I can jump for joy — if I choose to. That possibility may seem simple, but it marks a space where I am the subject, not the object of circumstance. It is a site where micro-gestures become affirmations of existence.

III. Maternal Liminality: Between Roles and Spaces

The third disjuncture is maternal. Drawing on Victor Turner’s concept of liminality (Turner, 1969), I see motherhood not as a static identity but as a threshold condition — between visibility and invisibility, productivity and pause, intimacy and display. The domestic is not hidden or aestheticised here; it is simply inhabited. I take influence from Mary Kelly, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and other feminist artists who challenge the division between public and private space. Julia Kristeva’s writing on motherhood as both symbolic rupture and creative potential (Kristeva, 2001) resonates deeply: maternal liminality becomes for me a space of emotional and cultural negotiation.

This liminal condition is also material. The interplay between digital video and Polaroid photography draws together the immediacy of analogue memory and the distance of conceptual framing. These works do not merely depict motherhood or place — they emerge from within them. The studio becomes a trampoline; the apartment becomes a stage; the act of filming becomes a gesture of continuity.

From Dom to Domovina: Migration as Situated Becoming

Leaving Serbia was a deliberate decision, made in response to the broader post-Yugoslav condition — shaped by ecological concerns, political stagnation, and the absence of sustainable artistic futures. My move was not an escape but a reorientation. Belgrade shaped me; London is the city through which I now reassemble myself.

The exhibition’s title — I’ve Found a New Place to Be From — reverses a familiar question. Rather than asking where I am from, I ask from where I might begin again. In Serbian, “domovina” binds house (dom) and homeland. Losing one shifts the other. Home becomes a constellation of situated becomings. As Edward Said reminds us, exile is not merely absence (Said, 2000) — it is also fertile ground for re-imagining identity.

Agent and Ethics of Care

This practice operates as both an agent and an ethics of care — processual, situated, and self-reflexive. I work through autoethnographic methods that allow my personal experience to function as both material and method. Following Donna Haraway’s notion of “situated knowledges” (Haraway, 1988), I do not claim universality. I speak from partial, embodied, and located truths. What has often been coded as marginal — the domestic, the maternal — becomes my central ground for critical and aesthetic inquiry. 

Care, here, is not a theme — it is the medium, the method, and the gesture. I do not aim to resolve the tensions of migration, motherhood, or identity. I aim to make their disjunctures visible — not as problems to be solved, but as conditions to be lived with, worked through, and shared.

Marija Kadelburg

Bibliography:

Amit, Vered. Anthropology and the Concept of Sociality. Berghahn Books, 2015.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press, 1994].

Bourdieu, P. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004.

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 1984.

Haraway, Donna. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 1988.

Kristeva, Julia. Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini. Columbia University Press, 2001.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell, 1991.

Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Harvard University Press, 2000.

Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Aldine Publishing, 1969.