HOMANITY: Beyond Home

HOMANITY: Beyond Home is an exhibition developed at the intersection of art and architecture as part of the broader HOMANITY program, presented in dialogue with the intellectual and cultural context of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. Conceived in collaboration with the Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Zielona Góra, the exhibition reflects on the meaning of home not as a fixed structure or a purely functional space, but as a living process shaped by care, memory, relation, emotional balance, and inner transformation. In this sense, HOMANITY proposes a wider rethinking of dwelling in the contemporary world: not only how we build, but how we inhabit, how we belong, and how spaces may support human well-being in a deeper sense.

At the center of the exhibition is a dialogue between the work of Józef Krzysztof Oraczewski and the architectural-artistic project Healing Houses by Alicja Maciejko. A key element of Oraczewski’s contribution is the nest installation, which recalls a motif from his earlier exhibition at the National Museum. Here, the nest appears as a place of origin, intimacy, safety, and early identity, but also as a form that cannot remain final. It is a space that protects and nourishes, yet one that must eventually be left behind if growth is to become possible. In this sense, the exhibition moves beyond the idea of home as shelter alone and toward a more profound understanding of home as something that must also be built inwardly. Leaving the nest becomes not a gesture of loss, but a necessary passage through which one begins to recognize that the deepest home is not only the one that surrounds us, but also the one we gradually form within ourselves.

This inward dimension finds a strong counterpart in Alicja Maciejko’s Healing Houses, which proposes architecture as a relational and restorative environment. Her project understands dwelling not simply as occupation of space, but as an active, conscious relation to the spaces we create and inhabit. A healing house is not merely a protective structure; it is also an expression of responsibility — for one’s own inner condition, for one’s rhythms and well-being, and for the wider ecology of human coexistence. In this sense, Healing Houses extends the exhibition’s central question: how might architecture respond not only to physical need, but also to vulnerability, recovery, emotional life, and the human search for coherence?

Within the broader framework of HOMANITY, Beyond Home articulates a vision of home that exceeds both enclosure and identity. It proposes home as a field of care, a structure of becoming, and a space in which healing may begin. In resonance with the wider reflections opened by the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, the exhibition suggests that the future of dwelling cannot be defined solely through technology, utility, or form. It must also include the human need for rootedness, renewal, responsibility, and meaningful relation. HOMANITY: Beyond Home thus presents home not as a closed answer, but as an evolving ethical, emotional, and architectural question.