Moving Home
Moving Home is a large-scale art installation and documentary project that explores themes of belonging, displacement and migration through the physical relocation of a Queenslander house from Brisbane, Australia to Eindhoven, The Netherlands. By dissecting the home’s function as a dwelling, an artefact, and a symbol of white settler identity, the project engages with contemporary dialogues on colonial legacy, housing accessibility, immigration, and place.
The Queenslander is a symbol of belonging in Australia, even as it is a symbol of incongruence, as it both blends into and stands out against the landscape. By bringing it into a European urban environment, its incongruence becomes stark. It belongs neither here nor there, yet the house itself embodies a very real sense of identity to a lot of Australians, regardless of cultural or ethnic background. At its core, this project is an attempt at a different approach for the way we talk about identity and belonging in this country. Those dedicated to a more radical application of decolonisation are divided against disenfranchised non-indigenous Australians, and the division is only getting wider. Here, a kind of 'what are we supposed to do, pack up home and go back to Europe?' sentiment is taken literally, through the uprooting of a Queenslander house and its subsequent relocation by land and sea to Holland. The house becomes a kind of third space where Australians of all kinds can coexist and share experiences, express differences, and ultimately unite together under new modes of belonging.
The outcome is made up of four components: a performance, a film, an exhibition and a data visualisation. The purpose of the performance is to demonstrate and correctly contextualise the monumental relocation of the house as situated within the tradition of large scale moves, while the film will display the process of relocating the house from start to finish for the benefit of the stakeholders and for presentation within the house itself during Dutch Design Week 2025. In this way the house is not only the subject of the story, but the interface through which the story is received.
The exhibition presents work from two parallel conversations—one about belonging in Australia, the other about belonging in the Netherlands, particularly within the Dutch Design Industry. As the percentage of non-Dutch practitioners within the community expands, assumptions around the nature of ‘Dutch Design’ break down and are replaced with questions surrounding immigration, permanent residency, and cultural identity. This evolving landscape challenges traditional narratives and opens up new possibilities for more inclusive, diverse, and less euro-centric design practices.
Finally, the data visualisation will cross examine data related to housing availability between Brisbane and Eindhoven. While seemingly arbitrary, the two cities are linked simply by my connection to both places. Having been involved in various protests against the notorious multiple occupancy permit wreaking havoc on the already exacerbated housing crisis in the Netherlands, my aim in reaching back towards Brisbane is to find the homegrown policies (shareholder satisfaction, negative gearing, equity inflation) causing the down surge in housing accessibility in Queensland, to examine the two against each other and visualise where we are through means that the public can clearly understand. The visualisation may take place as a graphic layer in the film, a piece in the exhibition, or a publication in the scale of the space.
Moving Home captures a contemporary iteration of monumental relocation, drawing parallels between historical migration and today’s globalized world. Through collaboration, storytelling, and artistic craftsmanship, Moving Home asserts Brisbane’s cultural significance in an international context while interrogating the very nature of dwelling and belonging.