As the old anchors for being tethered to the world seem to become undone and drift ever further away, the question of 'belonging' poses itself with a renewed force. What does it mean to belong to a place, to a community, to an affective space? How do we shape and maintain connections when infrastructures of collective existence break down? What could it mean to be-at-home? A persistent narrative of home assumes the possibility of a space which is pure, which is untainted by movement or difference; a place where boundaries are fixed and everything is 'in place', such that homes become safe and comfortable. However, the problems with such a model of home as a purified space of belonging are many, not in the least in that it projects strangeness beyond its walls. In such a narrative, movement is always already a movement away from that space which is considered as a beacon for familiarity. As if there is no strangeness and movement within the home itself. Furthermore, if this idea of home invokes visions of belonging, we might also be reminded that belonging participates in the language of possession, of property and propriety, with territorial effects in regard to space and objectifying effects in regard to people. But just because we are in a space together does not mean that we belong to the space, let alone to each other.

Against these stubborn commonplaces of home, many contemporary thinkers and artists have pointed out that home is not always fixed in a single location, and movement does not only happen when one leaves home. Home may involve attachment and movement, fixation and loss, and the transgression and enforcement of boundaries. Also, at odds with the overbearing tendency to privilege movement as the dominant form of social life and individual experience of the contemporary ‘global’ world of ‘flows’ and ‘liquidity’, it has been stressed that forms and conditions of movement — generally conceived as operating between ‘here’ and ‘there’ — are not only highly divergent but also necessarily exist in relation to similarly divergent configurations of being ‘at home’. If the bounds that constitute a home stand for protection for some, they also signify exclusion or oppression for others. While movement is taken for granted by some, it is constrained for others. Who moves, who remains, and under what conditions? What is the relationship between those here and those there? Moreover, where or what is ‘there’? Is it necessarily not ‘here’? When and how long is ‘there’ a significant site of connection? How far away is ‘there’? How does one measure that distance?

Measures of Distance is composed of a modest selection of films and performances that articulate specific experiences of home and world, intimacy and distance, location and dislocation, displacement and entanglement, while also seeking to complexify the distinction between here and there. Works that examine both how movement is experienced in relation to home and belonging, and how home and belonging are formed in relationship to histories of individual and collective movement. Works that challenge the possessive connotations of belonging and rather explore it as a relation whose evidence and terms always need to be contested. A program, in the end, that suggests that home is not a static concept, but an ongoing process. It may entail a labour of love or discontent; it may involve experiences of rootedness or rootlessness, desires for homeland or homecoming; it may be haunted by loss or filled with hope, but the work will always remain incomplete.