London’s Cally Festival, Part One: Where the Heart Lands - Cartographies of Hopes and Belongings

“On 6 July 2025, I laid a giant world map across the pavement, its blank surface waiting to be filled. Passers-by placed ‘dot’ stickers where they felt ‘at home’ and ‘balloon’ stickers where they hoped to go next, linking the two with coloured lines. Over the day, the map transformed into a living atlas of emotions, lines stretching like threads of memory and desire, converging and diverging across continents.

One boy marked Madrid as his ‘home’, a place he had never visited but felt connected to through football. A woman placed both a balloon and a dot on Chile, explaining that her sense of belonging and her aspiration were one and the same: home was the place she wished to keep returning to. These moments revealed the project’s essence, interlacing geography with personal narratives and embodying Massey’s (2008) idea of place as a meeting point of flows.

When participants couldn’t clearly define ‘home’ or a future destination, they wrote Post-it notes expressing their feelings. A teenager described home as “private”, framing it through boundaries, while a husband wrote, “Home is where the wife is”, anchoring it in human connection. These divergent yet coexisting views reflected the plural construction of home, encompassing comfort, relational ties, intimacy, and mobility.

In a quieter corner, a woman sketched her kitchen, fridge, kombucha jar, even mice—capturing not the room’s structure but its inhabited warmth. As Tuan (1977) observed, space becomes place when imbued with emotion and memory.

By sunset, the map was dense with marks, the Post-its layered with voices. Together, they formed a shifting constellation, an atlas of imagined geographies where longing and belonging entwined, revealing home not as a fixed point but as a continual negotiation between mobility and memory.”