Bittersweet Longing: The Impossible Return

This is a book chapter in a forthcoming book (published by Routledge, 2026), 'Provocations on Home, Place and Belonging Through Arts Based Research'

Edited by Adkins, Kirsten and Boyd, J. (Eds.) (2026). Routledge. (In Press).

Note, at this time this book is currently in press with Routledge, so information about page numbers and ISBN are forthcoming.

Outline:
Home: Provocations on Place and Belonging brings together international and interdisciplinary artists and researchers to formulate new creative articulations on what it means to be home, to be in place and to belong. Contributions are drawn from diverse global contexts and cultures as arts practitioners, and scholars work in dialogue with one another. What emerges is a constellation of personal reflections, philosophies, theories and practical approaches in dance, performance, visual arts and film.[1] Combining creative writing with images and analysis, contributors express complex understandings of home, its affectual states, and its temporal and spatial dimensions. Home may be remembered as a courtyard game in a once rural but now a densely urbanised environment of Skardu in Pakistan, where populations have long been displaced but the cultural imprint of childhood play remains. A sense of place takes the form of song dreamed of through the physical and temporal journeys from 18th century Armenia, through the salons of Paris in France and through to present day Canada. Belonging finds a place a coming together in dance across nations, originating in Congo via the Brazil to Norway and through southern and central Europe. It is also expressed a loss, through the knot of a red scarf that symbolises both childhood ritual in the former Yugoslavia, where the traces of a proud nationhood are almost forgotten.
 
This volume emerges during times of almost unprecedented global insecurities surrounding the personal and the political the domestic and the global. The year 2025 saw an exponential rise in xenophobia, wars, unstable and corrupt governments, genocide, famine and climate change. Amid such a backdrop, home occupies a contested dimension, often synonymous with the inhospitable, fragmented memories, and with loss. The aim here is to raise new questions on solidarity and statelessness and examines the complex relationships between the body and the subject, what it means to be home, and to belong. It acknowledges the trace elements that lay the conditions for such terms, not belonging, displacement and Otherness. What emerges is no one fixed or decisive rendering of facts, nor does the volume claim to peel back the layers to reveal how things really are. Rather it is our collective intention to produce new possibilities for thinking about home, place and belonging.

[1] Von Bismarck, Beatrice. ‘Constellation-Coming-Together in Public’ in The Curatorial Condition. Sternberg Press, 2022 (p32-45).

Anne-Marie Creamer’s Chapter for Provocations on Home, Place and Belonging Through Arts Based Research

Title:
Bittersweet Longing: The Impossible Return, by Anne-Marie Creamer
 
Abstract:
This chapter explores the idea of “temporal dwelling” as a methodology for contemporary arts-based research, drawing on the author’s own artist-filmmaker practice. Engaging Tim Ingold’s concepts of lines, meshworks, and dwelling, the essay reflects on artworks that respond to loss, absence, obsolescence, and institutional memory. Through projects including the speculative reconstruction of Eliza Soane’s lost bedchamber and collaborations with displaced railway workers in Puglia, Anne-Marie Creamer proposes that artistic practice can model more fragile, open-ended forms of belonging. The chapter contributes a methodology rooted in storytelling, ethical custodianship, and spectral return—offering approaches for working with loss, memory, and home in the context of ecological and social precarity.[1]

[1] This reconstruction (*Dear Friend, I Can No Longer Hear Your Voice*, 2022) was the Soane Museum’s first digital film commission.]

Bio:
Anne-Marie Creamer makes research-based film, drawing, and texts through deep institutional collaboration, practising what she calls “ethical custodianship” and “spectral return” - allowing erased histories to speak through contemporary forms. Her exhibition ‘Dear Friend, I Can No Longer Hear Your Voice’, was shown at the Sir John Soane’s Museum (2022). She is currently co-developing a Lived Experience Lab and drawing on her own archive of illness to make new work.

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