Domestic Bliss

3:21 min
2020

Consisting of a succession of still life shots of a house, the house that I live in, Domestic Bliss touches on themes like depression, isolation, the meaning of home, or what it means to be productive.

Drawing on Ann Cvetkovich's work on "public feelings", it asks about the possible politicization of depression in the context of neoliberal working conditions. "Can you be an activist in your own bed?"

Using Gaston Bachelard's reflections on space in "The Poetics of Space" (1957), it also explores the shapes a relationship to one’s house can take in the context of depression, and the creation of an "outside world" one has become alienated from.



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Transcription of the text

My thighs are filled with house
The house as quicksand

Day after day, I take root in a corner of the world
And the house is my corner of the world
It’s my first universe
It’s really a cosmos

The microclimate of hope
Sacred meaningfulness
Enchantment and magic
Spiritual transcendance

In high school I used to skip classes to go home and watch Desperate Housewives
Dreaming of living in a nice american white house with a porch
in a green and white suburb
and not working
Enjoying my clandestine domestic life while everyone else was at school or at work
was my true definition of freedom

I am productive on my own terms
A housewife
Housewoman?
Housegirl?
Houseghost?
Housecat?
Housedog?

Sometimes the outside world feels exotic
It is like a safari
And the animals are people living their life
A woman wearing red boots waiting for the bus
A girl putting her greasy blonde hair up into a ponytail under the rain
She seems nice
A man in a cheap navy blue suit sitting in front of me on the bus
So close
He’s talking about his holidays using the french word "congé"

Can I be an activist in my own bed?
At least I'm not a water manager in Australia

A ray
A highway
A sea of sun, hot like soup and hope
A hope soup

Behind the house, behind the garden, behind the cemetery, you go west
And it feels like home there
The trees feel like home there
But what does it mean?
It means joy, and nostalgia, and belonging
I belong where?
West is where spring is
And the moon moves westwards too