How I Dwell

Gen 260

When there’s a moon

the shadows in the house grow larger

Yiannis Ritsos, Moonlight Sonata

An eviction notice. Two words that cleave an elderly man’s day in two. Formal, cold, impersonal, the document is affixed to his door, foretelling an imminent foreclosure auction. The new owner is already on his way, perhaps with mud still clinging to his shoes. In that instant, memory, time, and space are violently rearranged, giving rise to a new self: the one cast out. As the old man gathers his belongings, snapshots of an entire life return to him – moments of joy, silences, losses, the hushed rituals of everyday living. A life that took root, blossomed, and bore fruit within these walls is now suddenly uprooted. A home, a shelter, comes undone.

The performance How I Dwell, which began as a diploma project, draws inspiration from the mythology of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, as well as from a news story – one among many small and large tragedies unfolding in the wake of housing auctions amid an ever-worsening global housing crisis. What binds these together is a shared axis, one of the few certainties in life whose loss resounds with devastating force: the home. The home acquired with plans and expectations; the one built with reason and dream; the one that has held the seasons and decades of our lives. The home that has been loved, inhabited, lived through.

Within the fabric of the work, journalistic sources and news archives intersect with literary and theoretical texts. On stage, fiction and document intertwine, imagination collides with stark reality, cinematic references meet poetic fragments, and strands of narrative and dramatic theatre coexist. Among them, deeply personal traces – associations, personal memories, recorded incidents – transform the stage into a space of intimacy: a temporary dwelling onto which we project our own relationship with the homes that contain us.

In How I Dwell, the house is not merely an architectural shell or a configuration of living spaces. It is an existential root – the first “H” of the title, sheltering human life like a roof.