hauntologies of the domestic



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still from hauntologies of the domestic (2025)
single channel video
black and white hd
8 minutes


At first, I thought of them as character portraits, stills of large and varied lives that, if composed properly, might condense the worlds that they had managed to fashion around themselves—if not their personhood, boundless and unwieldy—into portrayable material. I was not exactly certain that I believed this to be possible, this splicing of a life into microscopic slides that each carried all of its cellular information, but I was also not certain about a great number of things and had gone ahead to try, anyway. This began as another such attempt.


I had not gotten very far when my interpretative mechanism swerved and I began to think of them as elegies. These were mementos, I thought. They were napkins, they were rags, they were the ceremonial draping cloth. They were a series of final songs, a parting poem. It was this last bit that most confused me because I knew that I was touching an excess of life in death. I was weaving space for their accommodation while I bid them goodbye. But is this not what all funerals are? Rites of construction, creating a home for that which no longer exists? The irony is that there is always a trace, there are always remains, and this was the complication. A going no-where. Perhaps this is what I am trying to say: they are the dead who remain not by choice but because they have nowhere (else ) to go. They remain. They remain.

‘Hauntologies’ is the trendy artworld-academia term that I was rejecting right from the moment I began to come into acceptance of it. I keep returning to Derrida even when I intend to stay away from him. Such is the manner of intention, its conspicuous difference from action, sometimes an active antagonism. I did not wish to think about Derrida, or think with him. Yet I wanted to both use and reject the language—baked into which were his mannerisms, the glint in his eye when he made one word do what two could only strive to accomplish (can words be a kind of character portraiture?)—he had helped conceive. Another word I was reluctantly succumbing to was ‘conception’, but I do not wish to say any more than this.

I circle the question of the domestic. The violence of such a notion. What did it mean for a person or the history of an entire category of persons to be confined physically or ideologically (loosely tethered, at best) to the living quarters? What did it mean to ‘live’ under such conditions? I was very curious about the matter of familiarity, being an extension of the term family, which itself originally meant domestic (of the house) servitude. I was thinking about the proprietary nature of domesticity, the relationship between the domus ( man of the house) and the dominus (master of the house). I was thinking about domesticity as a historical identity linked to enslavement, of the house as the household, of the condition of (living) property to maintain (non/living) property. A circle of domination in which the “master” was the point curving around itself, and the family was the space held within the curvature that made it possible and yet was otherwise invisible.

Hauntologies of the Domestic (2025) was first installed (alongside a series of rag collages) at “Making Time” the Public Space One summer exhibition in June 2025. It was also shown as a part of “Open Source” a series of video installations also at Public Space One.