Between Homes: On Care, Identity and Belonging

"Between Homes" is an ongoing artistic research project exploring care, identity, family, and belonging. Drawing on my own experience as a migrant mother and artist, I have expanded my work through exchanges and interviews with people navigating displacement, non-normative forms of kinship, and different ways of creating a home. The title Between Homes refers not only to physical displacement, but also to the different ways we experience and negotiate the concept of home. “Home” is understood not as something necessarily fixed or safe, but as something shaped by relationships, care, and community, as well as by broader social and political conditions. “Between” leaves room for experiences that do not fit neatly within established structures: for moving between places and cultures, creating new homes, belonging in multiple ways, or not feeling fully at home at all.

In this discussion, I will reflect on who performs the often invisible work of sustaining home and family, and question the idea that home and family are naturally stable, private, heterosexual, and nuclear. My interest in motherhood and queer belonging stems from viewing them not as separate issues, but as interconnected through the same structures. Patriarchal ideas of gender and family have long confined women to reproductive and caregiving roles, while marginalizing identities, relationships, and forms of kinship that do not conform to heterosexual and reproductive norms. This raises questions about whose families are recognized, whose care is valued, and who is allowed to belong without having to reshape themselves to fit dominant expectations.

Through *Between Homes*, I consider identity not as fixed, but as relational, multifaceted, and continually evolving. I ask what might become possible if, instead of adapting people to existing structures, we begin to imagine structures of care and belonging that can accommodate the complexity of people’s lives.

Betül Aydin is a visual artist and artistic researcher born in Turkey and based in Germany. She holds a PhD in Media Informatics and Visual Computing from Université Grenoble Alpes in France. Working across photography, film, and text, her practice explores family, care, and belonging through personal narratives, domestic spaces, archives, and material traces. Her work reflects on how identity is shaped across generations and through experiences of displacement. Since becoming a mother, questions surrounding motherhood and the politics of care have become increasingly central to her practice, particularly the tensions between lived experience and normative ideas of family. Her ongoing artistic research project, *Between Homes*, began during a Goethe-Institut artist residency in Sofia and has developed further through a recent Culture Moves Europe mobility grant, expanding her research into different forms of kinship, care, and belonging.

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