RabachK VtP Collaboration Biography

Years ago, I read Ruth Behar’s piece titled, “Searching for home: My connection to place is fluid and complex. In a nomadic world, do we still need a home?” and would like to think through this piece more as I develop my VtP project. In this piece, Behar writes, “the meaning of home, I have come to realize, is full of contradictions, and impossible to encompass in a single definition.” As of now, I think I want to use the place of “home” as the focus of my project and attempt to tell a “spatial story” of one of the places I call home: Nesso, Italy, though I see this as expanding to include a few other places I’ve called or continue to call home like Muskegon, MI.  In this “place” of home, then, I want to think not only about some of my own unsettledness in these places, but the various toxicities that have always been present in these places (though I may just be realizing some of them now). I want the toxicity to focus on nostalgia, both my own and the narratives of nostalgia communities produce and continue to replicate, alter, and then reproduce. I’ll think of toxicity as something like a pharmakon--what do we swallow for survival? Toxic memories, toxic political structures, toxic silences, toxic traces, forgetfulness, amnesia, toxic delusions, toxic bodies and toxic futures.