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City Drill:
Homesick

Type
Solo exhibition / mixed-media installation

Venue
District Architecture Center – Sigal Gallery
421 7th Street NW, Washington, DC

Dates
October 1, 2024 – January 10, 2025

Organizer
District Architecture Center (AIA|DC / Washington Architectural Foundation) DAC

Exhibition & Programs Coordinator
Molly Ford, District Architecture Center DAC

Support
DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities; AIA|

DC Sustaining Firm Affiliate Members DAC

Media
3D photo-collages, cut-paper constructions, found architectural fragments, digital drawings and prints, mixed-media wall pieces.

“Philosophy is really homesickness—the urge to be at home everywhere.”
— Novalis
(Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg)

Homesick explores the house as both refuge and symptom. The exhibition starts from an old definition of homesickness as a medical condition, a sickness of distance, and asks what happens when that diagnosis turns back onto the buildings themselves. 

Across the gallery, collaged cities spiral into funnels, staircases collapse into interiors, and ordinary façades are folded into impossible perspectives. Each piece works like an emotional map: fragments of apartments, streets and objects from different countries are cut apart and re-assembled into new architectures of memory. The result is not a single home, but a dense accumulation of almost-homes, spaces that feel familiar and unstable at the same time. 

The exhibition proposes that houses do not only host health and well-being; they also absorb anxiety, repetition, obsession and grief. Domestic space becomes a container for our disorders and fixations, a kind of “sick home” where social density, economic pressure and cultural erasure leave visible marks on walls and plans. In this sense, Homesick is both diagnosis and critique: it reveals how architecture can homogenize us into a single way of living, while also insisting that our attachments to home are irrational, excessive, and impossible to fully cure. 

Through collage, cutting, and reassembly, the work treats homesickness less as nostalgia for one lost house than as a permanent condition—an architectural fever that follows the migrant, the exile, and anyone who has ever outgrown their own room.

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