In her installation Getting Home, Zora Volantes explores the concept of home as a fundamental human need for protection, security, and a sense of belonging. In the face of war, displacement, environmental changes, and the loss of affordable housing, the installation asks how a sense of protection can emerge under precarious living conditions.

 

The starting point is refugee tents in Gaza and other crisis-stricken areas. From this, the artist develops a sculptural architecture consisting of 18 tent-like steel objects, whose frames are covered with white, semi-transparent latex panels. Arranged in a fan-like pattern, the tents touch one another and, in some places, lean against each other. The result is a fragile tent city whose stability does not stem from individual, fixed structures but rather from their mutual dependence. The installation thus makes the vulnerability of individual living spaces just as tangible as the potential for communal cohesion.

 

The work should be presented in a room that can be darkened. 

The projection shows ants that appear oversized on the tent surfaces due to their distance from the projector. Their movements transform the architecture into a living, yet at the same time threatening, landscape. As symbols of collective ways of life, adaptation, and the search for living space, they extend the installation’s meaning beyond human habitation. The projection of the ants extends beyond the tent city and also falls onto adjacent wall surfaces. 

For the artist, the reversal of scale is very important here. The human perspective is suspended.

The installation includes the sound of ants communicating with one another, played through speakers from outside.

 

Getting Home combines sculpture, sound, and moving images into an exploration of loss, vulnerability, and solidarity. The work understands architecture not merely as a built structure, but as an expression of a fundamental human need. In this context, shelter does not appear as a self-contained, individual shell, but as something that can only emerge in relation to others.

 

The spatial installation *Getting Home* was first developed by Zora Volantes in 1999 as part of her master’s program under Rebecca Horn and was exhibited in 2003 at the Museum for Communication in Berlin during the Long Night of Museums. In 2026, the artist revisited and further developed the installation as a central work. 

 

 

Artistic Statement

 

Zora Volantes creates body-related objects as a second skin. She wears them on her body or drapes them over herself like a dwelling. She calls them WOMBS. At the intersection of the body, sculpture, and architecture, she explores protection, vulnerability, and security.

 

In *Getting Home*, she translates this approach from the individual body into a collective structure. The personal shell becomes a fragile architecture that relies on mutual support. 

In this way, Volantes expands her artistic exploration of the protection of one’s own body into a social question. How can spaces be created that provide people with a sense of security—and what does it mean to have a place where one is allowed to be?