By retracing his migratory experience, José Miguel del Pozo translates his disorientation into a feeling of uncanniness. He thus begins a reflection on the condition of the eternal stranger, in search of adaptation in a world that is both familiar and inhospitable.

UNHEIMAT/Der Prozess—Part One

Unheimat is a word i started thinking of thru a discussion with a friend. She started talking to me about the felling of strangement that comes when being far away from our homeland long enough so you actually live in this not so temporary new place. She was looking for a title for a something she is doing abroad and thought of a title: uncanny land. She needed to name the place she is going to be living for the next 6 months and how this was making her feel and think a lack in her own sense of (dis)placement.
I´ve always thought that whenever one would spend more than three weeks elsewhere from home one is oficially not travelling nor on vacations, but actually somewhere in wich life happens. #bleiben [staying]

I told her that uncanny has always been a sort of unprecise translation of a complicated German word and an even sketchier psychological term coined by Freud. She aknowledged and i wink-winked since i love wordplay and word creation.

Unheimat is a word i came up with by sticking together the negative prefix un to the word heimat, taking into consideration that unheimlich also has heim as an integral part of its overall meaning. Unheimat refers to the feeling of being stranged at/from/in our Home. New or old, one is pushed away from feeling like home in our home: one can be stranged of ones heim just by being there or/and making the effort to be and feel there.

Displacement comes as no surprise for those of us that have been moved by life to places in wich we do not belong completely and at the same time where we are thrown to make a living.

So what is Home? Home is (as my therapist told me) where the wound grows and builds safety, a safety made to make us feel confortable in our wounded womb, the womb from wich we come and to wich we spent a life travelling back to. Home is by every mean the combination of the womb and the wound that expells us from it. This is a place wich we constantly try to acknowledge and sometimes repair.

Unheimat is not a strangement from Home, but the lack of its presence in the place our house is posted today.

In the process of migrating we search and collect the pieces of a place thats being built elsewhere: in an undisclosed land that in present tense we dont know nor really care about, since factually it reminds us that we are not going home at the end of the day, a land that unknowingly affects and shapes our days in unfathomable ways. #weg [leaving]

This process of stranging our Home and the evidence that it will never be our Home, this strenth that moves us to build and imaging an un-present heim stripped of its present presence has the ability to make us time—and space—travellers: coming from a historically stiff and alien past we are shooted out to a future whose material evidence is bound to a present in anotherland.

Migrants are the only—painfully—free humans. As we are able to travel in time eventhough space is generally bordered and frontiered for us as an uncohesive Group of people.

I´ve been in Europe since 2017 and i have spent most of that time travelling because i used to make a living as a tattoo artist, but since i´ve moved to Switzerland last year the feeling of not belonging anywhere has grown exponentially, eventhough as a kid i moved a lot coming from a diplomatics household. I came to think that there is no home for me and that home is indeed the place where my displacement wound would save me, but as part of the evergrowing latinamerican diaspora i have also arrived at thinking that we assume a present tense unheimat where ever we are (dis)placed: going to the new world we are bound to be an integral part of an alien history and of the power architecture that was placed with the process of colonization from the old world.

“It was then that he believed the promise made to him was his mission. Even if he didn’t understand why it fell to us to fulfill a promise that, in truth, had never been made.” Clarice Lispector, The Apple in the Dark, 1996.

While living in Switzerland two constant questions have always found my way. One is “why Switzerland?” and i will save myself the trouble of repeating the answer, because of its layered evidence; the other one is “why are you working in a kitchen when it is evidently underneath your capacity?” that question is the center of this text, in a way i am writing the answer to a question they never stop asking. #auslander [foreigner]

I work in gastro and thru it i have been able to make a living that surpasses my needs, and that also makes my family back home have the necesary means to thrive and not only survive. That would answer not only the second question but it also gives a hint on the first one. As a migrant one is always with a feet where we are living and a feet in the land we left behind, that human bridge makes possible a life that is sometimes excedingly complicated to clarify to those who dont (have to) participate in it. #erklaren [clarifying]

By deciding to avoid art making as a living and doing a job that is seemingly underneath me as an artist i make things happen in a far away land where having this job would not account to much, less so to making any form of art besides the art of surviving where that is the rule for the majority of people on that side of the Atlantic. Instead of making art we have faith and F.A.I.T.H. means: Family Abroad In The Hustle, or like we say in Venezuela: F.E.: Familia en el Extanjero. #vertrauen [trusting]

In this case, as in many others similar to it, process becomes a way that propells itself into the future by looking into the past.

Process are the means to ignite process elsewhere, somewhere.

Anywhere.

—José Miguel del Pozo, December 2024.