From Chaos to Coherence: Reflecting on the Making of From Home to Home
The making of From Home to Home was, in many ways, an extension of the walk itself — a process defined not by linear steps, but by oscillations between intuition and analysis, disorder and clarity, material experimentation and theoretical framing. The photographs you’ve shared are not just documentation; they are visual echoes of a process shaped by uncertainty, precision, and a desire to communicate something fundamentally human: the feeling of being somewhere, moving through a space, and being moved by it.
Setting the Stage: A Room Full of Potential
In the earliest image, the space appears scattered — wires, clothing, tools, and even a teddy bear lie on the floor, as if a storm of intention has swept through. At first glance, there’s disarray. But looking closer, what’s visible is a kind of thinking-through-making: a provisional phase in which ideas are tested physically, placed in relation to one another, and left to speak — or not. This echoes Tim Ingold’s view of making as a “process of correspondence”, where materials and intentions evolve together in dialogue rather than under command.
At this stage, the emotional weight of the journey was still being translated into spatial form. The elliptical machine stood inert, not yet imbued with the role it would come to play. The knitted tubes hadn’t yet grown into the ceiling. But their presence already hinted at the duality the installation would come to embody: movement and stability, solitude and support, exertion and rest.
A Scaffold of Memory: From Wires to Columns
As construction continued, the room began to shift. The knitted tubes — initially just fabric on the floor — stood upright, transformed into colourful, bodily presences. In doing so, they changed the entire spatial logic of the room. They didn’t merely decorate the space — they held it. Echoing the strength and emotional support offered by “trail angels” encountered during the walk, these columns became metaphors made manifest: temporary scaffolding structures that nonetheless provided a profound sense of stability.
Knitting, a historically gendered and domestic craft, added another layer of meaning. It was not simply a personal gesture but a political one — an intervention that disrupted the expected boundaries of who makes, what gets made, and how care is expressed. The soft tactility of the yarn stood in contrast to the clean surfaces of the machines and screens, drawing attention to how personal memory and cultural codes of masculinity were interwoven within the work.
Technological Precision: Making the Machine Feel
The installation’s conceptual clarity came into sharper focus through its technical demands. As the photos show, countless hours went into perfecting the interplay between hardware and software. The Arduino board, discreet and unassuming, became a lynchpin in the relational ecosystem of the installation. It allowed the elliptical machine to ‘speak’ to the computer, and in turn, allowed the audience’s body to speak back to the work.
There is something quietly poetic in this loop: a machine originally designed for fitness, repurposed as a conduit for storytelling. The circular motion of its wheel mirrored the rhythm of walking; its connection to the magnetic sensor created a pulse — one that activated a world beyond the white walls of the gallery. Here, technology did not dominate experience, but served it. The labour of coding, testing, and refining became a way of ensuring that the viewer’s own body could co-author the narrative.
From Movement to Meaning: The Installation Comes Alive
As the space neared completion, the immersive projection system was installed — a curved triptych of screens surrounding the viewer. Once activated by the elliptical machine, the projection enveloped participants in a slow, meditative landscape of fields, forests, and footpaths. This was no passive viewing. As participant interviews later confirmed, the shape of the screen, the motion of the walk, and the ambient soundscape created a powerful illusion of presence. Many described not just seeing the walk, but feeling it — recalling their own journeys, re-inhabiting personal memories, and entering a state of flow.
This immersive effect was not incidental. It was the result of a carefully staged choreography between body, space, and image. The use of looping video and delayed activation was particularly effective. It played with anticipation and desire — concepts drawn from Deleuze and Guattari’s writings — which transformed the installation into a kind of game: a reward system where physical engagement with the machine ‘unlocked’ the visual narrative.
The Viewer as Co-Creator
By the time the installation opened during the Quiddity show, the space had become a responsive system rather than a static exhibit. The viewer’s role had fundamentally changed. No longer a distant observer, the viewer became a co-performer, a trigger, an agent of activation. This dynamic aligned closely with what Mario Pedrosa observed in the work of Ernesto Neto: that the artist proposes, and the viewer disposes — not destructively, but generatively, through action and interpretation.
This shift — from author to proposer, from viewer to participant — is emblematic of a broader trajectory in contemporary art that can be traced back to Barthes’ Death of the Author. In From Home to Home, this lineage is not only acknowledged — it is enacted. The work’s meaning emerges in the space between the artist’s walk and the viewer’s footsteps, between the digital memory embedded in the footage and the emotional memory awakened in the participant.
A Simulation, But Not a Copy
To conclude, the installation does not attempt to represent the journey from England to Italy. Instead, it simulates the conditions for a personal, sensorial, and emotional encounter with the idea of peregrination — understood here as a layered, unfolding mode of being-in-the-world. This simulation is not a copy, but a transformation. A real-time, embodied translation of walking into space, into fabric, into sound, and ultimately, into meaning.
Each photo you’ve taken tells part of this story — not just of what was built, but how it came to matter. It is a story of labour, care, recalibration, and trust: trust in the materials, in the technology, and ultimately, in the visitors who walked into your world, and made it their own.