You Must Go Home Again : Ash Eliza Smith

YOU MUST GO HOME AGAIN (2018) is a live art game that incorporates chance, play and error as part of the experimentation—and fun—to be had. This interactive game activates multiple locations—and invites you to participate in an experience, a place and a performing archive of Black Mountain College, North Carolina and created in collaboration with Mike Calway-Fagen.

The name draws from the undoing of Thomas Wolfe’s posthumous novel, You Can't Go Home Again and deals with facts, romantic falsities, and perspectival narrowing of Southern-ness through representation and stories. It also deals with the notion of unheimlich (uncanny) which translates literally to unhomelike. It asks: unhomelike for whom, or for what? Home permeates thoughts of nature, the environment, and ecology in a way that de-centers the human and connects with the original Black Mountain college as a site in the Appalachian Mountains, a place dedicated to the same topographical upheavals produced by the regions tectonic unrest.

The Black Mountain left behind a home to relocate to a new home in Western North Carolina and Wolfe’s book explores his disillusionment with Germany during the rise of Nazism. In both cases the notion of -going home again- has multiple meanings; home can be relocated.

This game is not necessarily about winning or losing but is a way to experience a place and an archive.