Occasionally, once every two or three weeks, I come back home to the Netherlands, cycle on my own familiar route. Recognisable spaces give me relief and I realised I like to do things I can do with my eyes closed. I turn my playlist on shuffle and auto-play songs. Autoplaying is easy. I am sitting on the couch, surrounded by personally decorated interior, which has become a comfortable and familiar ritual. To feel at home is to experience a familiar comfort with objects. An apartment or a house is either furnished or unfurnished. When I moved into this apartment, the previous tenant kindly offered me his furniture. I replied to him that I would prefer the apartment to be empty. Things accompany me in my moves. People move with their things: their most cherished possessions as well as the more common ones. So I can say I inhabit my belongings rather or as much as the place.

At an open-air exhibition, Bruegel’s Eye: reconstructing the landscape, artists were asked to reconstruct a Dutch and Flemish painter, Pieter Bruegel’s art works with their interpretations. Pieter Bruegel is known for his landscape, incorporated a unique perspective into his paintings, looking from high above at an artificially composed landscape with a dramatic scenography effect. He did not paint life as it was, but composed and distorted his landscapes like editing with a Photoshop. Art critics assume that during his travels to Italy, he made sketches of the Alps and incorporated them into his paintings. Each piece of places where he travelled composed into one canvas. His paintings are like souvenirs.

A French Novelist, Georges Perec, explores various ways of looking at interiors, architecture, and environment in his book Species of Spaces and Other. Perec elaborates that his spaces (such as the birthplace, the house, the tree, and the attic) are fragile and ambiguous and time is going to wear them away. In his words, “Such places don’t exist, and it’s because they don’t exist that space becomes a question, ceases to be self-evident, ceases to be incorporated, ceases to be appropriated. Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. It’s never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it.”⁽⁵⁾ I could apply his words in relation to objects; they form a sort of continuation of our ego. We mark, we trace, and we align our existence through home decorations. “Nothing will any longer resemble what was, my memories will betray me.”⁽⁶⁾ When we are at home, we associate ourselves to the past, which brings us to the stage of comfortable and relatable. We find strong connection from the present to the past through the space and objects.

In 1931, Walter Benjamin describes his collection of books as the souvenirs and the memories that arise. These books evoke him the places, and memories that he had contact with. It highlights that the role of portable objects in stabilising memories has been emphasised by the research on mobility. David Parkin explores the importance of the objects that refugees choose to bring with them and how they use these objects to identify themselves in a new environment.⁽⁷⁾ These examples are relevant for an anthropological understanding of the constitution of identity through changing environments, even when moving occurs in less dramatic circumstances.⁽⁸⁾

These portable objects have a strange power when they bring the feeling of home. Simply link the present with the comfort of the known past. They become voices in the house, speaking to me of other times and places. It gives me a spell to reduce the anxiety of impermanence. “Furnishing fulfils us by offering frames for our mortality, it describes our attitudes towards time.”⁽⁹⁾ Home decorations and arrangements are the preservation of identity, which signifies escape from the pressure of daily life and practice to prevent its ‘destabilisation.’⁽¹⁰⁾ Constructing a stable home through objects becomes the protective layer of permanence. We maintain and secure our ego through what we bring when housing is unstable. As I walk passed stores, I see a poster for sale in a second-hand store painted by a monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. One reads: “It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.” I imagine this frame being hung on walls from someone’s living room to someone’s bedroom.

When the time comes to move. I ask myself many questions. This process becomes critical in the experience of mobility inasmuch as it relates to the sorting out of relations and memories. ‘What should I bring?’ or ‘what can I bring?’ become major questions when it comes to making decisions. When social relations that build around these objects start to appear on the air, this simple question turns into a tough one. It becomes a mission of social construction.⁽¹¹⁾ The move is also an occasion to better determine what is useful. Some things are brought for obvious reasons, because they are still good and simply useful. We also face a practical decision when we make a choice of what to bring. Some things we are less attached to, but they are still necessary for living. They were useful and they will always be. “Bye plant. Bye, chair number one. Bye, chair number two. Bye, table. Bye, wardrobe. Bye, sink. Bye-bye, skylight. Ma, say bye-bye to room.”⁽¹²⁾ In the last scene of The Room, five-year-old Jack, who was born in an isolated shed and finally manage to escape the confinement and gain his freedom, says goodbye to the only friends he has known his entire life.

Some of us might change our beds after a break-up or even move to a new place without our belongings. We intend to leave them all behind to be detached. Things may remind us of our ex-lovers⁽¹³⁾ so we intend to leave them even though they are still attached to us. To start over again. Mobility is taken to lead to detachment, which gives us a feeling of being in control, a feeling of being free to move in the symbolic sense of the term. Some leave without their belongings. They free their belongings in trying to free themselves from the burden of their past. It is a relief: fewer things need to be remembered, managed, or worried about. Getting separated from our belongings is the same as getting separated from all that appears to be safe, familiar as well as memories. In Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed uses the example of Husserl’s working table and its surroundings to illustrate the matter of orientation. “If orientation is a matter of how we reside in space, of how we inhabit spaces, and who or what we inhabit spaces with?”⁽¹⁴⁾ Moving becomes a turning point to reshuffle relations and habits by bringing them back into consciousness, by throwing them away and by deciding which ones to carry. Moving becomes an opportunity for us to orient ourselves through the transformation of our surroundings in terms of the choices we make.