New issue of the Open Arts Journal edited by Emerita Professor Helen Hills
Issue 11 covers the theme Dwelling on the everyday: houses, ghosts, ellipses and was co-edited by Open University Professor Alice E Sanger.
Excerpt from the new issue's introduction:
The essays collected here investigate from diverse points of view the relationships between places where people lived and what is left behind, salvaged, celebrated, or overlooked, but may sometimes be reactivated in powerful and unpredictable ways by those who come later.
These papers examine houses as homes, as shrines, places where people lived and what remains after they have left, and how those places are memorialised. The question of the burden of the past, its unfulfilled potential, and its painful obliterations, together with the ways in which these qualities may come to occupy houses and preoccupy their visitors (or vice versa), are key here.
Almost all the essays investigate – through diverse topics and methods – the ways in which the past resonates in houses no longer lived in, how it leaves its mark on places, and how people leave their mark on their dwellings, what traces are left and how they are celebrated, fetishized, banished or ignored. Which aspects of whose presence tend to get overlooked or even formally erased, by whom, and on what grounds? What are the risks of the temptations and blindspots of enchantment of the allure of famous people’s homes? Might we learn as much (at least about ourselves) from the houses to which we do not readily respond?