We're a global community – we hop flights like busses, set up office in airports, fly internationally and back within a day for a meeting. Some work in London and live on French farms; others home up on remote islands and spend their year's bulk touring concert venues and festival stages; still others abide in urban centres, escaping for mountain-stuffed weekends, forests and beaches.
Home may well be where the paper envelopes of our physical mail land, and yet, when we leave it to refresh our senses and replenish inspiration, we can find - in new surroundings - ourselves feeling another sense of coming home.
So where, or rather what, is home?
Even amidst our travels and the excitement of things new, we seek nests for repose - places of ease and comfort.
What makes that space? How is it evoked from the road?
The hug of a familiar sweater?
Comfort food? Or any food cooked for us with care?
A connection with a friend, whether physical or digital? A chat with a stranger? Writing a postcard to our beloved?
Or returning to that café we discovered yesterday and finding the staff now greet us in recognition?
Is home the familiar or simply a sense of being seen?
Whether on the road or off it, for bliss or business, at the end of the day, the nest we “come home” to, wherever it may be, is ideally a place where we can exhale and recharge.
In these conversations we'll speak with cultural trailblazers who make “home” between multiple cities and countries. We'll meet artists who live most of their year on the road, and Arts curators who remain closer to base, nurturing harbours for creative world-wanderers. We'll hear how home is evoked for these culturati, learn a little about their travel rites, and get their insider tips and personal favourites for the cities they come from and the cities they live in...which perhaps will become the cities you visit when you make a getaway from your own home - and find, quite possibly, you've landed in another.
"I've always felt that the beauty of being surrounded by the foreign is that it slaps you awake. You can't take anything for granted. Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love, because suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked 'on'...Suddenly you're alert to the secret patterns of the world. The real voyage of discovery, as Marcel Proust famously said, consists not in seeing new sights, but in looking with new eyes. And of course, once you have new eyes, even the old sights, even your home becomes something different.
And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It's the place where you become yourself."
- Pico Iyer
BEHIND EVOKING HOME
Evoking Home is an interview / conversation series brought to life in November 2017 by Andrea Samborski.
For over twenty years, Andrea has dedicated herself to Arts & Culture between her homes of Basel, Switzerland and Vancouver Island, Canada.
From 2009 - 2016 she was co-creator, co-curator, booker and artist liaison of the former Parterre Kultur venue in Basel, Switzerland, presenting "Big Art on a Small Stage" (where analogue stage lights, and a wall of candlelit antique mirrors oversaw an intimate "pin-drop" space of just 150 capacity).
Artists who Andrea invited and welcomed to that stage include:
John Grant, Glen Hansard, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Anaïs Mitchell, Sam Amidon, My Brightest Diamond, Nils Frahm, Eivør,
Peter Broderick, Blue Rose Code, Laura Veirs, Sarah Blasko, John Bramwell, Jenny Hval, Agnes Obel, John Smith, The Tiger Lillies, Lau, Dan Mangan, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Tom Freund, Adem, Barbarossa, The Deslondes, James Yorkston, Withered Hand, Anna von Hausswolff, Stornoway, The Strumbellas, Howe Gelb, Liz Green, Rachel Sermanni, Boy, Lord Rochester, She Keeps Bees, Aldous Harding, Liesa Van Der Aa, Nina Kinert, Ben Caplan, Gysbert zu Knyphausen, Dota, Wallis Bird, Sarah Reid, Daniel Norgren, Haram, Three Blind Wolves, Ewert And The Two Dragons, Spring Offensive, To Kill A King, Hey Rosetta!, Isbells, Denis Jones, Moddi, The Black Atlantic, Madison Violet, The Miserable Rich, Erland & The Carnival, Paul Tiernan, Louis Barabbas & The Bedlam Six, Harper Simon...among others...
In November 2016, Andrea went independent and founded eclipse concerts.
A graduate of the University of Victoria's Department of Theatre, she holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts with further studies in Cultural Anthropology and French Language & Literature. In addition to concert curation and a fierce love for presenting stand-out artists in good spaces, Andrea works as a writer, translator, singer-songwriter and voiceover artist.
Moving over twenty-five times in her life, ping-ponging between continents, growing up between cultures, and relating to others in five languages, has seen her continually exploring, re-defining and crystallising her own definition of home. The Evoking Home Conversations, for her, weave a myriad of passions, questions and curiosity - people on creative journeys and their stories at the heart of it.
