Through the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us experienced home in a new way. I’ve spent more time at home these last 12 months than I could have imagined. A year ago, I wouldn’t have believed I’d be living in my childhood bedroom for six months. But from March through August 2020, my blue room turned into the space in which I socialized with friends over Zoom movie nights, finished course requirements for graduation, worked a summer internship in finance, and debriefed my day with my younger sister each night. For me, the notion of home has oscillated between a literal space in which we are confined and a protective bubble full of love that keeps us safe from this invisible pathogen.
While creating this virtual exhibition, I spoke to each of my family members about what home meant to them and how this year changed their perception of home. For my sister, home became a gym where she created new training regimens to stay in shape for swimming, a studio where she filmed TikTok dances, a test kitchen where she sampled the bread my mother baked. For my father, home was his new office, the place from which he FaceTimed his father in London to check in, where his daughters ordered far too many Amazon packages. For my mother, home was the backyard patio where she took her coffee and biscotti each morning, where she helped my sister with college applications, where both her children and husband were safe. For each person, home had morphed into something new, and we each experienced the same physical space differently. In curating my Virtual Space for Dialogue, I could not shake this idea. How, as a global community, do we experience home, belonging, and identity?
For much of this pandemic, my sister has been in the process of applying to college. One day in early September, after I had moved back to Dartmouth, I called her, and she read a draft of her college essay to me as I wandered around Occom pond. After we hung up, I went to my room and reread my own application essay, written four years ago. I had written about a club I had started called UnderHill, which focused on finding and building community at my high school. The essay tied together my own confusion over my multicultural identity with a need to help build community and a home for others. Somewhere, hidden among a multitude of cliches, I arrived at the conclusion that although I had grown up in six different cities spanning four countries and three continents, I considered home the places I help to build. In other words, for me, home means the communities to which I contribute. Rereading that essay for the first time since I submitted it back in 2016 was odd. I had already begun working on my Virtual Space for Dialogue without consciously realizing how important these ideas of community, home, identity, and belonging were for me. As a mixed-race individual—my dad is Kenyan and Indian and my mom Italian and French—I never quite know where I fit in society. These issues seem to subside from consciousness under the weight of daily life, and I exist as myself. Subconsciously, however, they come to me frequently. Where do I belong? How do other people perceive me? Although I have grown in so many ways over the past four years as part of the Dartmouth community, the very themes that I used to introduce myself to the College are still with me today.
Halle Dantas will graduate from Dartmouth in 2021 with a degree in art history and public policy. She has been involved with the Hood Museum of Art through Museum Club since 2019 and is currently the Levinson Intern for Campus Engagement.