Do you remember Hölderlin's poem? The experience of rootedness is essentially expressed, according to Heidegger, in nostalgia for one's homeland and in the return home, which is fundamentally nothing more than a return to the familiar, to the closeness of being and the place of one's dwelling. The pain of nostalgia is not produced by the uprooting experienced by the individual, who lives far from the place of their birth, under different cultural, social, and political codes, but rather by the impossibility of returning home. Ultimately, that is what nostalgia is: the way we experience the distance from what is closest or the closeness of what is far away. But this experience of "one's own," of longing for one's Heimat (homeland), is unthinkable without passing through "the other," through that which one is not. It is impossible to think of rootedness to one's own while overlooking the experience of recognizing other lands and other worlds. The strange should not be understood exclusively in terms of spatial parameters. Certainly, a culture, a country, a place we don't know is foreign to us, and for this reason, we feel like we're away from home. This experience of living away from home is not easy to explain or understand. It involves intertwining experiences that at first glance may seem contradictory, when in reality they are deeply integrated with one another. Certainly, there is distance, remoteness, and a break with what is our own; a strangeness that surrounds us and, in some way, determines us: we adopt a language different from one we can't truly master; we feel and act differently from others, whose feelings and actions we often don't understand and sometimes don't accept; we think and express our ideas with a different rhythm and texture, with a different "color," which doesn't agree in many ways with the other's. The confrontation between what is our own and what is foreign extends to the realm of the body, since we even look and walk like strangers.

Although Miguel Ángel Benjumea's (Cádiz, 1982) work, HOMELAND/HOMELESS, may seem to depict the typical situation of helplessness and abandonment experienced by thousands of people when they leave their homes in search of a better life, the concept behind this piece goes much deeper. HOMELAND/HOMELESS consists of two thermal blankets bearing the words HOMELAND (homeland) and HOMELESS (homeless), a photograph referencing one of the blankets, and a large nautical chart of the Strait of Gibraltar printed on heavy fabric. The allusion to the perilous journey across the Mediterranean is clear, combined with two opposing words that share the same root, "HOME" (house), and which are part of the same underlying problem.

Positioned opposite each other in a dialectical relationship, their multiple meanings explode. The concept of "homeland" unfolds fully, transcending mere geographical boundaries and encompassing family, language, community, and traditions—in other words, the individual heritage that fosters a sense of belonging. This entire weight of meaning is contrasted with "Homeless," which refers not only to the concept of being without a roof over one's head, but also to the lack of heritage and roots. Two antithetical realities that, nevertheless, need each other to signify, since it is impossible to experience a profound love for one's own without having longed for it at some point. Furthermore, the thermal support upon which Benjumea places these two opposites, an emergency material used to prevent hypothermia, speaks to the human need for protection and shelter.

Regina Perez Castillo