Isabella Capezio: To build a home

Large-scale collage

Isabella Capezio is an artist and lecturer in photography at RMIT with a PhD in Media and Communication, living and working on stolen Wurrundjeri Woi Wurrung land.

Isabella’s work and research explores ideas of failure, queerness, and nature and how alternative and expanded forms of photography can unsettle existing colonising forms of representation. Isabella is interested in experimental, process driven and site-specific engagements with environments and their histories to address the climate crisis, extraction and colonial logics.

To build a home, Queer families do not have the laid groundwork of heterosexual ones, and such complexities require resourcefulness.

As a queer person growing a family, I’m reflecting on how queer families ask you to weave in what materials you can find to create comfort and stability, a home. Like a nest, they are built by collecting what is at hand, scraps, offcuts, fluff, twigs, spit, and dirt. The coalescence of fragile materials is reinforced through its intersection. The home reflects environmental conditions, familial tensions, and seasonal forces. In this sense, queer is enacted, embodied and performed, queer is the affective connections created through relational ecologies, to a family that is built and not given.

Influenced by Sara Ahmed and Donna Haraway’s writing, ‘to build a home’ is a proposition for a new way of thinking about family, identity, the body and desire. The large-scale collage includes figures overlaid and overlapping on textured surfaces by blending and splicing failed photographic prints, photographs, clippings from old textbooks and test strips.

‘To build a home’ is a document that weaves together found materials with candid moments of hurt, love and connection.

When a path is not clearly laid out, when queer takes you off course, the journey is one of building and becoming.

Visit Isabella's artwork in front of Mornington Peninsula Shire's office at 2 Queen Street, Mornington.