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With the project Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant*, artist Katja Mater reflects on the meaning of home. Katja searches for what home can look like. During this residency in Katja’s hometown Hoorn, questions around returning home, arriving in a (new) place, hosting, and grieving come together.
Katja was born in Hoorn, simply because it was the nearest hospital with an available place at the time. Shortly afterwards, the family moved to Amsterdam. Since the death of Katja’s parents, questions around home and belonging have taken on a greater significance. The idea of – and the possibility of – going home seems to have lost its meaning, Katja explains. “I could no longer open a front door with a key that had been hanging from my keychain for decades, to enter a space that was not mine, yet felt more familiar than most places I have lived in over the years.”
During the residency, Katja will work on a film installation with the working title Holder of Self. In parallel, a renewed connection with Katja’s parents will be sought by preparing recipes from her father Marius’ cookbook, which was almost ready for publication at the time of his death. The chapel will also be filled with the thousands of nature photographs taken by Katja’s mother Carla, who worked as a nature guide.
Surrounded by everything that feels so familiar, in a place that is neither entirely familiar nor entirely strange, we are curious to see what time and stillness in the chapel will bring Katja. What can this homecoming offer?
* The title Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant refers to the 1982 novel by Anne Tyler, a character-driven story about the Tulls, a family from Baltimore. Pearl, the mother of three children, reflects on memories of her life and family as she approaches the end of her life. It is one of many novels Katja discovered in her mother’s library after her death.
Bio
Katja Mater is a visual artist, filmmaker, editor and educator working between Amsterdam and Brussels. Mater’s artistic practice is focused on the parameters of optical media and combines various disciplines such as photography, film, drawing, performance and installation.
Mater works to reveal the ways in which optical media and the human eye behave differently, the former being capable of recording events that simultaneously can and cannot be—holding them midway between information and interpretation. Revealing a different or alternative (experience of) reality through mediating between time, space, perception, and our understanding of them.
Alongside a solo practice as a visual artist, Mater is involved in different collaborative projects, as editor of Girls Like Us Magazine since 2014 and as one of the founding members of Mothers & Daughters, a Lesbian* and Trans* Bar.
by Stine Sampers