HOMES in Milan brings six houses and one question to Piazza della Scala

For some people, home sounds like keys being put down in the hallway. For others, it’s a voice from the next room asking how the day went. There’s the house you grew up in, where you could still find the light switch in the dark. And there’s the answer some people would give anything to be able to offer: somewhere I can go back to tonight, and tomorrow too.

From 17 November, that question will have a Milan address. Six houses will appear in Piazza della Scala, between the opera house and Palazzo Marino, in a part of the city where there’s always someone hurrying through. You can go inside. You might come out with a different answer from the one you had a few minutes earlier.

The stories are on the walls

HOMES began with a question Yuval Avital took into Progetto Arca’s reception centres: ‘What does home mean to you?’ Over several months, people staying at the centres and staff took part in conversations and workshops with the artist. Memories, images and wishes emerged from those meetings. People from the worlds of entertainment and culture answered the same question. The words gathered became posters, a first way of bringing those answers into public view.

The next step is the installation in Piazza della Scala. Avital, whose practice spans visual art, composition and sound installations, shaped the material gathered in those meetings into six house-shaped sculptures. Visitors can step inside these multisensory structures. The stories collected over the course of the project are inscribed on their walls. You walk through a space that has been given form, in part, by the words of the people who helped make it.

The workshop photograph at the top of this article catches one stage of that work. A hand writes on the page beside a drawing of a house. Before the six structures in the square, there is this smaller scale: someone sitting at a table with a pen in hand. The posters and then the installation take what was gathered in those meetings and give people passing by a chance to spend time with it.

Some participants, who have been supported through Progetto Arca’s social housing programmes, will speak about their contribution at the 17 November presentation. Their involvement tells you something about how the work was made. The artist gave those stories a physical form and the people who shared them helped shape the project. The square makes public the result of work that began months earlier in the reception centres.

From memories of home to the right to a place to live

Think of all the things you can do because you have an address. Write it on a form. Invite a friend round for dinner. Get a letter in the post. Leave a book open by the bed and find it there the next day. Without a home, even these ordinary actions take time, coordination and a new solution each time. Hours spent working out where you can sleep are hours you lose for everything else.

Time feels different when you know where you’ll spend the night. You can make an appointment for next week, keep the paperwork you’ll need or give someone a reliable postal address. Housing insecurity puts those ordinary possibilities in question. That is part of what the word ‘home’ carries in this installation: the right to organise your life from a place where you can stay.

Fondazione Progetto Arca has spent more than 30 years supporting people experiencing homelessness and families in difficulty. Social housing is part of that work. The question at the heart of HOMES touches two sides of the same experience: what home means to us personally, and the right to a place to live. The first is easy to think about when there’s a set of keys in your pocket. The second comes into focus when you take stock of how much of your day depends on those keys.

Visiting the houses in Piazza della Scala

The press presentation is scheduled for Tuesday 17 November at 3 pm in the Sala dell’Orologio at Palazzo Marino. The opening moves out to Piazza della Scala at 3.50 pm, when the route through the houses opens. The installation is free to visit until Tuesday 24 November and has the patronage of the City of Milan. Explore the project and see the posters.

You encounter the work in one of the busiest squares in central Milan. Some people will come to see it and others will find it on their way to work or to the Galleria. The question to take inside is the one Avital asked at the start of the project: what makes a place home? It’s worth taking a moment to see how an answer changes when someone’s words are given the shape of a sculpture.

If the exhibition makes you want to give some time to a homelessness project, our guide to getting started with volunteering in the time you have includes practical steps for applying to Progetto Arca. Start with the time you can give regularly, so the commitment can fit into your week.

The square matters, too. Some people will come specifically to see the work. Others will happen upon it on their way somewhere else. For a week, people who know what it’s like to live with housing insecurity will have space for their stories in one of the places where Milan presents itself to the world. It’s worth remembering that when you leave the square and go back to the city where people are dealing with the rent, a move or the search for a room.

At CHIARA! we’ve just covered the World Day of the Poor and the lunch planned for 22 November in Rome. Making room at the table and working for the right to housing meet different needs. In Milan, people who know what housing insecurity feels like have helped shape the question the installation puts to the city.

From a conversation in a reception centre to a sculpture open to anyone passing through Piazza della Scala. That is the path HOMES has taken, and it suggests where to begin. Before you step inside any of the six houses, listen to the people who helped give it shape.