The minimum home

This paper is an exploration into the role of objects in the creation of the domestic interior and the establishment of a sense of ‘at home’. It argues that personal possessions create an itinerant domestic interior and proposes that this interior represents a place-unbound meaning of the home – the minimum home. The paper investigates this hypothesis by project and text. The project applies archaeological methods of research to an existing domestic interior. It is a study of modern material culture, which probes the relations between the objects, their owner and a specific site. The text continues this exploration through a theoretical analysis of the relationship between an individual and his personal possessions that draws on the fields of anthropology, philosophy and psychology. Project and text attempt to understand the material ‘at home’ constructed by one’s personal possessions and the immaterial ‘at home’ created by their relationship to their owner. The paper uses these two forms of inquiry to argue that personal possessions are the minimum material means necessary for the individual to create a sense of ‘at home’; they represent the minimum home.