kl 15:00 - 17:00

"Hemma är wherever me da la regalada gana!" - "Home is wherever I goddamn feel like it!" is a compelling sound art intervention by Rossana Mercado-Rojas. A sequel to Home is Where the Heart is (2019). The work features a spoken word by Princess Jiménez Beltré. (La Dekoloniala org).

The title blends three European languages the artist currently navigates by choice or necessity. Loosely translated, the phrase in Abya Yala Spanish, “Home is wherever I goddamn feel like it!” becomes an empowering statement, a playful act of refusal.

Using a combination of sound, installation, and image projection, Mercado-Rojas creates a space where individuals are invited to feel at home—at least temporarily. Her practice reclaims agency by filling the space with empowering visual and auditory expressions drawn from her own Andean cultural practices and experiences, creating new symbols from the old while preserving their essence. People can connect through a range of sensory and symbolic elements: sound, color, symbols, words, tone, and repetition—evoking the rhythm of a mantra, a prayer, or a call. These elements create a shared emotional and spiritual atmosphere. Fabrics and objects of personal significance—such as a handwoven textile from the artist’s great-grandmother, or a glass printed with her grandfather’s face and name, a memento from his passing—are arranged in altar-like structures that evoke ritual-like experiences.

With participants at its core, the work summons energy to consecrate the space as a sanctuary—where community is felt, not forced, and where the relentless machinery of coloniality is held at bay. Shaped by a specific political and social context, the work challenges traditional notions of what it means to belong somewhere.

The work was presented as part of the curatorial series Checking the Temperature, curated by Noël Platts, and realized as a degree project for the Curating Art International Master’s Programme at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University.