One Work: Kline Swonger
A Place Called Home (detail), 2021, cast concrete and soil
[Image description: Numerous doorknobs, of various shapes and sizes, are fixed to a white wall via metal skewers. The doorknobs are made of mixed white and brown materials. Light from above casts shadows in the shape of elongated doorknobs onto the wall.]
When I sat down and spoke with Kline Swonger about her new installation, A Place Called Home, one of the first questions I asked was if she knew from the outset of her creative process that the end product would be displayed in the San Diego International Airport. For someone interested in exploring concepts of place and ideas of loss within her work, the airport seemed to be both the impetus for, and antithesis to, all that Swonger hopes to engage in her practice.
The airport presents a space where all sense of place has the potential to be lost. In its incessant campaign to connect all locations, one might wonder if the superhuman means of transportation characteristic of an airport have, in fact, dissolved more places than they have made accessible. Just as an individual object is distinguished by its limitations, which demarcate it from its adjacent objects, an individual place is also defined by its boundaries. However, an airport—by reducing all locations to just a day’s journey away—has achieved the means to transgress these physical limitations. Insofar as these boundaries are necessary to the character of a given place, though, infringement upon the boundaries of a place constitutes a violation of the integrity of that place. As such, it was curious that an artist so interested in place would develop a piece that would knowingly be exhibited in a space that threatens the solidity of so many places.
A Place Called Home, 2021, cast concrete and soil, installed at the San Diego International Airport
[Image description: The work, in a plexiglass display case, installed at the airport. Overhead lights reflect in the plexiglass and on the marble floor below. A hallway extends beside the display on the left. A sign to the right of the installation reads “Introducing Kline Swonger.”]
The sense of spatial disorientation has permeated Swonger’s own experience in San Diego. “I’m interested in exploring connection to place, as I’ve never quite known where I belong,” she tells me. This lack of belonging, I imagine, is what prompted Swonger to reach out to the community of San Diego, to learn of others’ intricate relationships to the places they inhabit. Residents from all over the County responded, providing small bags of soil from where they lived, along with a written memory of a place they identified as home. The surprise comes in learning that for many of the participants, the place they identified as home was not here in San Diego, where they currently are. Though they may live in a place, that place isn’t necessarily home. This is to suggest that many amongst us are missing a certain connection to the locations in which we spend the most time, leaving us without steady rapport with our physical surroundings. An ironic conclusion to draw, given that the proposal Swonger submitted for the project was responding to a theme: “Make Yourself at Home.”
Swonger’s installation features one hundred and seventeen doorknobs— cast from a mix of concrete and the San Diego soil provided by residents— in a nod to San Diego’s latitude at 117.1611° W. But regardless of the measurement’s specificity, no matter the precision the decimal point suggests, many of us seem unable to find the place that our GPS would tell us is “home.” Swonger describes the airport as “an in-between state,” with people “flying in from all over the world and passing through, but nobody’s really staying there.” Maybe this same unrest extends beyond the terminal’s walls; people from all over the world are coming to San Diego, but they’re just passing through—it is not their home, which even many residents of the County had identified as somewhere other than where they are. Thus, when we arrive at our own front doors, we find that the doorknobs do not open onto a place we call our own. In Swonger’s installation, they’re mounted steadfast to an immovable expanse of wall. With this contradictory use of doorknobs, she hoped to capture the disorienting experience of the airport and beyond. You cannot access a wall, and the real mystery lies in considering what exists on the other side.
A Place Called Home (details), 2021, cast concrete and soil
[Image descriptions: Two close-ups of the installation. The doorknobs appear to be made of crusted white material, mixed with brown and reddish-orange substances. These materials give them the look of erosion or rusting.]
The doorknobs are arranged in a shape that resembles imagery of neural activity within the hippocampus, the area of the brain activated by thoughts of, and feelings associated with, home. However, following discussions with a professor in UC San Diego’s Psychology Department, Swonger recognized that identifying exactly where home exists within the mind is more than a little complex. Even her own representation, she notes, is not a direct translation of neuroimaging of the hippocampus. Instead, the brain scans she looked at merely inspired, rather than directly correlated to, the shape the installation took. Just as home cannot be traced back to a certain point on a map (at 117.1611° W), it likewise cannot be reduced to any one neural map; where home exists within the mind is specific to each individual. But in attempting to reduce all locations to just a day’s journey away— as the airport does— we run the risk of dissolving the individuality that can make a place home. In our pursuit to bring all locations ever closer together, we jeopardize the distinct characteristics that can create a sense of belonging within a space. By prioritizing the proximity of one absolute, singular, homogeneous “place” that is accessible from anywhere, we’ll lose the heterogeneous places that are familiar to us and, along with them, any place we once called home.
A Place Called Home, 2021, cast concrete and soil
[Image description: The installation, housed in a white square frame, viewed directly from the front. The doorknobs make the approximate shape of a horizontal letter ‘S’. Two electrical outlets are positioned on the wall directly below the framed work.]
Still, Swonger is careful not to completely denounce this precarious, transitory position we find ourselves in. Though it presents certain risks, it also “feels very open... there’s something really permissive and interesting that happens when you’re in that in-between place.” It’s as though we achieve a new kind of freedom when we reach the space where we are devoid of any significant relationship to the physical world. When we are without anchor, without physical bearing, we are without determinations; the future is not to be constructed by any past obligations to home. “You begin to start asking other questions,” Swonger says, “to start seeing things differently because you’re not really one place or another.” As we move closer to realizing this lapse in place, all of location being reduced to but one, it seems that new opportunities arise as others dissipate. As the cliche goes, with one door closing, another one opens. One can only wonder, though, if we wish to see to what ensues at the turning of that knob.
— Thomas Sanbeg, undergraduate at the University of San Diego in Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Humanities. Sanbeg was a participant in the 2021 HereIn Writers Workshop.