Page - 211 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/01

Exhibition Review: Home Alone Together | 211 Ailie M. Posillico Exhibition Review Home Alone Together, curated by Aaron Rosen and S. Billie Mandle Accessible at https://imagejournal.org/exhibitions- home-alone-together/ In book twelve of his Confessions, Augustine tells God that there is no better name for God’s “heaven of heaven” than God’s “house” (domum tuam). It is in the home, in the domus, that the “pure heart enjoys absolute concord and unity in the unshakable peace of holy spirits”. Augustine goes so far as to say that his soul begs to be inside the home. It is the only thing for which his soul yearns. Riffing on a passage of the Psalms, he writes that his soul’s “single request” is that it may “dwell in God’s house all the days of its life”. In his Confessions, Augustine not only compares God’s home to heaven, he also claims that the home is heaven; home is where “absolute concord and unity” can be enjoyed.1 Augustine’s enthusiasm for the home, his declaration that it is “heaven of heaven” seems uncanny in a time of quarantine. For those of us lucky enough to have permanent shelter, the four walls and roof over our heads can feel more akin to a personal hell than to a place of eternal domestic bliss. A kitchen that has been adapted to fit the experiments of your child’s science class, a bath- room that now doubles as a greenhouse to fit your growing collection of plants, and a bedroom that also functions as office space: our houses are stretching to incorporate our confined lives. Thus, the buildings meant to be most intimate to us, the ones that makes us feel as though we can turn inside from out, as though we can delineate between “private” and “public” spheres, have neces- sarily needed to hold more. Our homes now function as more than space that provides reprieve from the workday, more than space within which to cook and clean and sleep. Our homes are now functioning in ways that exceed what we 1 Augustine 1991, 252. www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/1, 211–215 DOI: 10.25364/05.7:2021.1.14