WHEREING: A Podcast about Belonging and Design

We speak with Maria Amidu, an artist, whose work explores the relationship between people and place, and what is hidden, obscured or unspoken, a clarion voice of the common experience. She unmasks the ignored, mutable stories of migration, un-belonging, and remembering - what it means to be anchored while simultaneously erased. She asks, "what part of the other's story belongs to us"?

WHEREING explores ‘where we are’. Like clothing, we are ‘WHEREING’ (wear-ing) our spaces. Hosted by architect/designer/professor Nina Freedman, these are mindful conversations about BELONGING, SPACE AND DESIGN.

Where Are You? is a basic existential question.

Where do you belong? Where are you most yourself?

Where is home? Does home witness you?
Your soul is an intimate, soft witness to places in your memory, and the stories that unfold to curate the arc of your life. Home is in your soul. You take it with you. It remembers you.

Your spaces and objects hold personal, family, community, city and cultural stories. They form a layered map, collage and embodied geography, of touch, hear and smell. They contain beautiful and imperfect fragments that describe your place in the world. At its essence, WHEREING is about the questions of belonging, where you are.

How is your story revealed in your space? Or maybe it isn’t.

At WHEREING we talk about connections or disconnections with spaces or objects, and how we equally impact the spaces that impact us.

These conversations will be based four categories, or what we call ‘neighborhoods’.
Belonging/s, Transiency and Stasis, Places I cannot Change and Aesthetic Aging Occasionally we feature a great home story. Together we will journey though a creative map of the emotional place.

The first season of WHEREING will have 12 episodes, with interviews featured twice a month.
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Clement Luk Laurencio is a storyteller and master artisan of pencil drawings. His surreal, poetic drawings capture the dreams, inventions, memories and flashbacks of places he has lived, visited and cherished. He calls them ‘spatial fictions’. He says they are an invitation for pause, and wandering, in its timeless labyrinth. He probes the question ‘how is the dwelling a place of reverie and protection for the dreamer?’ His work, which has won numerous awards, depicts themes of the pandemic; loss of connection, forced enclosure, and fantasies of the future and past. When I came across his work, I was struck by the depth of his imagination and skill. And, he is only just beginning.

It is one year into the pandemic. Colleges closed their doors in March of 2020. Students weighed their decisions about how and where they would continue to learn. Where are our students now? What are the impacts, and unexpected lessons that they have learned?

We speak with 3 students who all have different stories. Emma Bowers has had a nomadic experience. Alex Durham went home to live with family. Irene Pan is a Chinese international student, who decided to remain in the USA and study online.

Born in Germany, post World War II, as part of the generation with the ‘grace of late births’, Dagmar Richter describes the impact of that context and time on her work, identity and places she has since lived. She talks about engagement and discourse in her work as an architect and educator, as the necessary antithesis of the wall of silence she experienced when young. Her work deconstructs, exposes and reveals what is often uncomfortable, or what she calls ‘not smooth’.