The always-there community
Articulating loneliness and feeling of not belonging or worse, feeling that one is not welcome, is hard. Thankfully, many people have articulated these experiences so well in literature, film…online forums. But I wanted to somehow talk about it here in the context of business and rural life.
A big part of how I approach my day to day work or just life in the Arctic has somewhat, quietly, dominated by being quite alone with my thoughts in a very rural part of Finland, that at times can be vibrant but many times just very very quiet and monotone, not what I’m used to.
Rural places for me are tricky because there’s not a simple outlet of feeling relief or community to ground yourself and brush things off when you feel out of place, and feel not-wanted. I end up ‘harvesting’ these micro experiences without being able to talk about them, and it has started to pile up — and it’s not only the inability to be able to talk about them:
In cities, these difficult experiences for me were easily and passively put to me in context as soon as I stepped in to a bus and saw people like me, or went into a store where the person behind the counter looked like me. I miss this, and in a way, it’s the basis for me to feel community without having to always engage — there is that visual cue, a small observation of community, even if there wouldn’t be the slightest interaction or engagement. I just need to see myself in others and on a normal day that’s enough to feel that we’re in this together. In this rural town there is not that obvious and easy cue for me.
One of the concerns I have when trying to work on the artist residency and promote it to people who look like me and when inviting diversity in the simplest sense to the House, is that it becomes a proxy or an exercise in integration of some sort — a vehicle to have those cues. I hope it doesn’t come off as a showcase for the community, or for me. And I hope the experience for the artists and guests is rather that they can take a piece of our home, and add it to their collection of places they can call their home.
There’s this pie chart I imagine we call home, a house, a place — and in my mind the pie can be sliced infinitely, to everyone.
Thanks for reading, appreciate it!
H