Homepage

They say home is where your heart is set in stone. For 25 years, home was this tall building on Roma street in Beirut, my constant. The place where I would go to school from, to the museum, to the pharmacy, to visit my friends, etc. Although I still go to these same places, today, home is on Charles street, in Providence, Rhode Island. I decided to make a list of the generic places I would usually go to, looked them up on the map in Beirut and traced the trajectories that resulted between these locations and home. Then, I extracted these trajectories out of their context and applied them onto the Providence map at a 200m scale, by overlaying my home address in Beirut over the one in Providence. I took note of where these locations would lead me in Providence and drove around the city while filming my discoveries. Surprisingly, most of these places lead me to spaces that brought back memories, some that visually hinted to the original Beirut locations, others leaving me confused and disoriented. Homepage is the website that I created based on these findings. The homepage is a set of abstracted trajectories from Beirut. When hovering over each location, a second dashed trajectory is revealed, highlighting the paths in Providence. Each location is explored through a video that consists of the footage I recorded in Providence with a personal voice-over narration of my memories in Beirut. The website navigates in a linear manner, going through a set of experiences and never allowing the user to go back to the homepage, ultimately, never being able to return home. I was standing in this infrathin space, an awkward ‘in-between’. I was walking the paths from Beirut but seeing with my eyes in Providence. In the hopes of reconciling between two homes, the mysterious narratives added a layer of romanticism to the stories, and an intense displacement for me. Professors: Bethany Johns & Clement Valla