After 7 years of progress, joy and fear, labours and celebrations, encounters and solitudes, disappointments and hopes, here we are. Josefa has now entered the embellishment phase…
Could we not say that our migrations, from time to time, lead us to a home, to our home?...
Undoubtedly. However, it is not always the case. Quite often, our migrations, at first, sometimes for good, take us away from "our home". But this exit from the familiar or from our families can also become a self-discovery, a discovery of the other, of another society.
In this way, in Brussels, the Josefa House invites people to think and experience the relationship between the "House and I".
To be dispossessed of one’s original "home" for various reasons and to find oneself confronted with a new experience, another House, calls us to question the meaning of our migrations. Why me? Why you? And what part of me, of you, is subject to "migration"?
In a house or home, if the space allows it, a meeting with oneself can develop mysteriously: if the place does not exist solely for the purposes of integration into a society (which would then be very closed), but instead, first and foremost, as an experience between a "house" and oneself.
The Josefa proposal is a little like this: when the house begins to look more and more like me.
Josefa is about daring to rebuild one’s self or to "reveal" one’s self, as one chooses and in a safe place.
In a way, Josefa is about taking the time, if the need or desire exist, to review, to look at what our migrations are, what they offer us, despite the tragedy; to enjoy what is still possible for oneself, with others, in the fundamental sense that, from time immemorial, we were born migrant, in order to become an even better migrant and without having to, at all costs, end up in a forced "integration". Because the road does not stop where some people would want it to… for others.
You and I are migrants in a common "house" and, paradoxically and mysteriously, beyond that common universality.
If the 20th century resonates with social progress and human rights issues, inthe 21st century we are focusing our attention and our sensibilities on migration ...
