Home Sweet Home: Should anyone live in a cardboard house?
Home Sweet Home is an international creative initiative started by designer Milan Janic to bring the world’s attention to the issue of homelessness. It is a concrete call for action aiming to encourage the public to think about homelessness and act upon it. The project's goal is to give homeless people access to cardboard 'houses' and encourage the use of these temporary shelters as billboards conveying a simple message: no one should have to live in a cardboard box. Home Sweet Home is an open project. All artists, performers, galleries or organisations that would like to contribute to it are welcome to cooperate.
Problem
How to draw attention to the issue of homelessness? How to do something tangible to solve it?
Description
Home Sweet Home is a 3-step design and communication initiative:
- Provide access to temporary cardboard 'houses', and
simultaneously use them to build awareness of homelessness;
- Raise this awareness further through film, photography,
testimonials and other projects;
- Create a concrete call for action to counter homelessness: 'make something from nothing', e.g. raise money by selling cardboard design items, such as house-shaped piggy banks.
Results
So far, around fourty designers, photographers and writers from all over the world have already joined the project. The first visible event took place in Belgrade from 19 to 22 April 2010, displaying video installations, the actual cardboard designs, interviews of homeless people, and selling items to raise money to buy socks for a Belgrade orphanage. After Belgrade the project will travel to Madrid where it will be presented during Interactivos?'10 at MediaLab Prado on 8 June 2010.
Financing
All project contributors are volunteers. The 'Home Sweet Home' project does not depend on financial support from official institutions. All the help it received so far has been in the form of in-kind contributions, such as the free use of exhibition space and free material. The projects sticks to this financial workingmethod in order to keep it open to anyone who would like to contribute to it and remain independent.
Contact info
Home Sweet Home
Milan Janic (Project author),
tel. +33 6 60 15 69 68
Project start date
2008