The 21 Houses and Other Stories is a project developed and realised at Krowji, Redruth, involving the exchanges of my artworks, based on the 21 houses that I have lived in, for participants’ artworks and personal letters.
The project investigates the idea that connectedness can be experienced through the process of making art and the exchanging of produced things, as outlined by the question:

How does sharing interpersonal narratives through writing and art practice, centred on my 21 Houses and involving audience participation, facilitate meaningful conversations and foster social connections?

Framed by the concepts of Materiality focused on the things we make, Autoethnography and Gift-giving as a social practice, this project is inspired by my lived experiences as a Brazilian immigrant and reflections on multiple belonging, moving from house to house, town to town and country to country.

Based on my living experiences of moving houses and embodying homes, my body of work explored the relationship between line drawings and memories, translating them into yarn, fabric and objects.
The houses are not just about the places I have lived. Nor a statement qualifying the number 21 as big or small. It is about the moving; the movement embedded in the migration journey and the ever-changing perspectives (hooks 2015). It is about the inevitable thoughts connected to belonging and border-crossing, embodying my autoethnographic journey.

The houses are about the things that I chose to bring with me and the things that I decided to leave behind. The silly-precious life treasures that I carried to build my shrines, and the fabric scraps and yarn that always find their way into my luggage and moving boxes.

The houses hold fragments of memories potentially recreated while moving (hooks 2015) and in the movement, translated by line drawing to tell stories (Ingold 2015), investigating the relationship between the lines, the memory of moving, and the movement of my hands.

Once the body of work was completed, more than an exhibition, the public-facing outcome presented an invitation for artwork exchanges, or gift-giving, considering the absence of clear comparable value between the given and received artworks, fostering social interactions (Sansi-Roca 2015) and connections.

Krowji, Redruth was selected to host this project, considering its status as the biggest creative hub in Cornwall, enhancing engagement with other artists. The space embraced a different exhibition every day (sometimes every few minutes), framed by the exchanges within the local and wider communities between professional artists and self-proclaimed makers and crafters. All the things exchanged, their embedded narratives and how the exhibition transformed itself during the process were documented.