Animal Instinct

… a lifetime spent searching for a place to rest, to feel at home in, where inhibition and reticence are shed; a corner in which to flee to when in need of comfort…

We are wandering souls continuously on the greatest quest – to belong, to find the eluding idyllic resting space. Gliding, stumbling, running, engaging and backtracking we move through being; the nomad in us searching for that transient space, feeling or state; leaving fading footprints that prove the reality and fleetingness at once.

It is a simple game we play with ourselves, stemming from the primal instinct of fight or flight; we live for the unknown not the known, for guilt vs. pleasure for delirium vs. sanity. The unexpected that lies in the invisible future is what spurs us to flirt with the intended, to entice it, to play with it. Curiosity drives us to explore, it convinces us that the attractions we may feel are worth pursuing; we become our own vessel for the uncharted, always in motion, enrapturing ourselves with our surroundings… Then why is it that our will to probe and reach beyond the horizon is powered by the need to belong? A contradiction in and of itself, yet a truth notwithstanding the fact that it is impossible to generally define the notion of belonging – the search is confidential and partly subconscious, despite the common denominator is the need for to achieve Heimat.

Home is complex for it – the essential concept – is fluid, malleable, and delicate; it is ever-changing as the blocks that construct our ‘perfect home’ transform and evolve with every choice and step we make in the journey. It is our need for the new, the desire to experiment, the inherent not wanting to fail yet yearning for experience that redefines our every move. It is through this continuous conflict within us that we are able to define our own notion of home/Heimat over time.

Surrounded by people, objects, and the monsters we create ourselves, the animal instinct prevails and we are driven by the indiscernible force to discover, to hunt, to prey on our own future; we self inflict our own reality defining home as our transitory safe haven from one moment to the next. Home – whether physical or abstract, whether conscious or subconscious – is never static yet is always complete in its incompleteness. We will always belong to the entirety that is life; in each precise moment it is a gesamtkunstwerk but it is dynamic, and therefore as soon it is whole it is already lacking as time has passed and the search endlessly continues.