How We Build Home

How We Build Home is a photography exhibition and interactive installation by artists and academics Azeezat Johnson and Wasi Daniju exploring the experiences of women of colour in the domestic space.

Using traditionally gendered techniques such as quilting, and documenting the process in zines and essays, they explore how we can make home with each other, even when we’re not physically in the same space.

Our home-making practice is about being loved for who we are, who we’ve been, and the endless possibilities of who we might be. It is us sitting in the knottedness of our embodied geographies with the care and love that we deserve.

How We Build Home is a project created and developed by GEM Collective initially in response to the Museum of the Home’s Rooms Through Time, and evolving into a particular exploration of how Black women build home, whether by and for themselves, or in relation. Imagined by the late Dr. Azeezat Johnson, and developed with artist Oluwatosin Wasi Daniju, the project explores the many faces of home, those we have experienced, those we imagine, and the possibilities of home that we can build together.

While the physical manifestation of How We Build Home is present in the form of film, photography and installations, so much of its essence lay in the loving, challenging, questioning and comforting conversations between Azeezat and Oluwatosin over the past two years and more which created the foundation of much of the work on show.

The exhibition also features a large-scale patchwork quilt and zine, both created by the Women’s Group of the South London Refugee Association during the pandemic lockdown. The quarantine quilt was conceived as a project that the group members could work on collaboratively, despite physical separation.

Throughout history, quilts have symbolised connection, particularly in all-female spaces, and working on this joint project helped the women’s group to overcome the isolation of lockdown. The quilt, and the stories behind it, reflect a space of compassion and joy, and feeling of strength in togetherness, created by the women’s group community.