The Poetics of Home
a project by Stefana Dilova
The following project explores the most intimate space of a family – its home – with different atmospheres portrayed in eight short films chapters.
Written content that describes imagined spaces of this type is the fundamental medium used in this analysis.
Eight core atmospheric narratives from the auto-fictional novel Territory of Light written by the Japanese author Yuko Tsushima were adapted into corresponding short film chapters. These film chapters came into being through the interpretation and representation of the text with the help of architectural and artistic tools. The poetic depictions of everyday spaces found in the novel that previously only existed in written word can be phenomenologically traced in the film.
Film Chapters
About the project
The Poetics of Home explores imagined spaces of "home" depicted in fictional literature.
The novel Territory of Light by the Japanese author Yuko Tsushima was the focus of this analysis.
The story in the book follows the life of a single mother and daughter for one year in an apartment on the top floor of a dilapidated office building in Tokyo. The work by Thushima encapsulates very poetical images of ‘home’, as well as how it is perceived by the main character, Fujino.
The author of The Poetics of Home imagined and visually translated selected spaces of the home described in the book. Atmospheric properties such as light, colours, shadows, materials, the seasons and sounds enable a different way to perceive a space that up to now existed only in the form of text.
The 8 film chapters combined into 1 film represent and vitalise different atmospheres and conditions in the apartment that the main character of the book, Fujino, inhabits. These atmospheres can be traced through the original text in Japanese and its translation into English by Geraldine Harcourt.