Racconti di case. Il linguaggio dell’abitare nella relazione tra generi e generazioni

HOME NARRATIONS. The Language of Dwelling In Gender and Generation relationships. Home is where the different historical path of the two sexes engrafts and portrays itself within the contingency of time and the inhabited territory; looking at the home-house in its endless inner variations requires the patience of retracing all disciplines from an historically ‘feminine’ point of view, one based on the internal space of the home as a place where the reproduction process, situated in its first biological phase within the female body, happens and continues. Identity gender structures and the transmission to the human specie’s young are deposited in the inner home patterns, and in the forms of dwelling in which they grow up. The home is a language that expresses and determines the structure of relationships and the experience of the world. It is inside homes that the variations of gender and generation relations, even the most unperceivable ones, grow: the objects, the furniture, the space arrangement, the ways of using objects and places, even the colors, materials and forms are both sensors and symptoms of these changes. There is a contiguity/continuity between lived space, body and thought that is recently beginning to be considered as an investigation subject. If we are to think human beings within an environment, then the home can be considered as the space of an irreducible surviving unity. My research was carried out on a sample of ten houses, situated in a town of the Eastern province of Bergamo (Northern Italy), and inhabited by parents with children within the age range of two and eighteen. The meeting with each home and its inhabitants has been narrated in single stories, including the entire interviews which can be found in the appendix.