The Stay Home Rapid Response Collection at the Museum of the Home 

Monday 5th July, 2021

By Veronique Belinga, Documentation Assistant of the Stay Home Collection

The Stay Home Collection is a digital collecting project that documents how people’s experiences of home life and home making have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Since its launch in April 2020, over 400 stories have been submitted, each reflecting on how the pandemic and the restrictions it imposed have reshaped the realities lived within, outside and around the home. The analysis and display of material in the Stay Home Collection is a core part of the Documenting Home strand of the AHRC Stay Home Stories project. The project’s first podcast features compelling voices of experiences of staying home during the pandemic. With ‘Stay Home’ stories, the Museum can reveal and rethink what home means through active engagement with personal testimony. The personal animates the lens through which these stories are told. The stories submitted respond to different aspects of home life - where people live, what type of housing they inhabit, how their use of the space and how the day-to-day has (or hasn’t) changed due to lockdown. Contributors makes sense of how their lives around work, education, health and community are transformed as a result of the Stay Home mandate.The following testimonies all share an idea of what home means and how it has changed during the pandemic – home having become a multifunctional space, a place for retreat and renewed comfort, somewhere to belong for the first time after a long time or a network for support and organised care. Simon who lives in a flat My home has always been my sanctuary and is now more than ever. I like being home and am lucky to have space and interests to keep me happily indoors. Being a frontline health worker is exhausting right now and home represents a space away from all of that.Kate who lives in a semi-detached house We have a living/dining room that’s our main living space - and now it’s everything: where we eat, play, exercise and work. The dining room table doubles up as a school desk, a place to draw and bake. Tony S who lives in a retirement flat “When I first moved here, a few months after my wife died after 50 years of sharing a home this was just a place to live, not a home that I felt comfortable in, a place to return to after being out.  I think the place has lost a bit of its neutrality, its original impersonal character. It feels more 'mine' now, reflecting all my activities.”Jake who lives on a council estate “About 10 years ago the local T&RA on the Pelican Council Estate opposite our house became “Pelican Plus” - inviting the streets bordering the estate to become part of the group. I’ve been on the committee there ever since (…) So during lockdown we’ve been organising food parcels for vulnerable residents who have slipped through the net (…) The committee have regular Zoom meetings and a WhatsApp group (…) We make a point of speaking to people on the street. It was already a friendly road. It has become more so.” The material is collected – digital images, audio and written testimonies – through an online questionnaire accessible on the museum website.  The ways in which these stories are collected match the urgency to document the rapid changes happening across a spectrum of home settings. One of the Collection’s features is the use of a rapid response collecting model. It consists of ‘collecting in-the-moment’ to document socio-political and cultural changes that are playing out in the present. The rapid response collecting model was conceived by the New York Historical Society in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in 2001: the initiative was rooted in the immediacy and necessity of collecting material from the events as the phenomenon was unfolding (Debono, 2021 https://europepmc.org/article/PMC/PMC7871047). In the case of the Stay Home Collection, this model has encouraged widespread participation in the UK as well as abroad. It also encourages contributors to speak on the events that particularly marked their home. One event that comes up in some of the stories is the Thursday night Clap for Carers:Onjali Rauf who lives in a terraced house in East London“My street is full of families from all walks of life - English, Chinese, Somali, Pakistani, Indian, Bengali, Turkish, Nigerian, Kenyan, Polish, French. Whilst none of us know each other intimately, we know who is who and belongs to which house, and the recent Thursday night 'Clap for the NHS and Key Workers' events have been lovely in bringing us together.” I now want to consider the ways in which the material from this digital collecting project can expand and animate critical debates about how the Museum approaches and defines home. The Stay Home Collection highlights the need to engage with different expressions of home life and think critically about how we develop our understanding of home in relation to wider social, political and media discourse. More than a year on since the first lockdown, we are more keenly aware about the disparities between the ideal conceptions of home and its lived realities. Indeed, when lockdown restrictions were first imposed, the relationship between Covid-19 and the home assumed that every household was somehow affected by the pandemic and that the crisis was a unifying force. Public messaging such as “we’re all in this together” deployed by government and the media suggested that the crisis was experienced in the same ways across Britain. Educator, researcher, and scholar-activist Francesca Sobande (2020) examines how brands’ framing of the pandemic produced commodified notions of connectivity, care and community to (re)present their products, services and themselves as being essential, ethical and invested in people (Sobande 2020 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1367549420932294).Sobande rightly asks: “Who is the ‘we’ in ‘we’re all in this together?” and argues that the appeal to emotion, compassion, shared responsibility in marketing material obfuscates structural inequalities directly affecting different homes. If anything, the Stay Home mandate has highlighted key issues faced by people and communities around the access to liveable housing, work and job security as well as the access to physical and mental healthcare services. When I was asked about the current gaps in the collection on the Stay Home Stories podcast, I talked through my own experience in which, at the start of the pandemic, staying home was not an option (Stay Home Stories, 2021). “That idea of home not being the only place I’m at or can be” complicates the narrative of home particularly for individuals and communities who are most vulnerable to structural violence and socio-economic disparities. It complicates the very nature of home itself in Britain where the hostile environment has justified the persistence of home raids and deportations during a pandemic and lockdown restrictions (BID, 2020). It’s hard to talk about home without considering how legacies of empire, colonialism and racism play out in the question of who has a claim to home. According to Sobande, what’s even more telling is how similar rhetoric has been used to justify austerity measures in 2010. Therefore, an approach that universalises the notion of home cannot honour the multiplicity of home in how people define and build it in times of crisis.  The Stay Home Collection can help us think about the unequal bearing of the Stay Home imperative and the ambivalence of the “we” in our framing of solidarity and collectiveness during the pandemic. The rapid collecting project should function to inspire different meanings and representations of home as well as provoke and critique established notions of home life within public and national discourse. What other considerations motivate this rapid response collecting project? Making sense of home has been about asking people what it is like and giving the space to share some thoughts and document the experiences for themselves. The relationship between the collecting project and its participants is central to how we understand who and what constitutes the museum’s collections. Indeed, without people’s readiness to participate and share, this collection would simply not exist. In my position as Documentation Assistant, it is important for me to approach the process of documenting this time as something we do collectively. In turn, this can inform how the Stay Home stories are preserved and transmitted in the present and into the future. In incorporating the Stay Home stories into the Museum’s collections, I think we need to look more closely at how we make sense of them in museum databases. In an article for the Horniman Museum & Gardens, Community Action Researcher Juma Ondeng thinks about the nature of museum databases and how they promote inaccessible forms of knowledge production and record-keeping:“As long as museum databases in the western world remained shrouded in secrecy, so many assumptions will be made as to the nature of collections in them and how they were acquired […] By appreciating community knowledge regarding these objects we are, in a way, entering a new era of understanding objects. This is in big contrast to the past relationships in which the curators from western museums tended to prescribe ways of understanding African objects.” (Ondeng, 2020 https://www.horniman.ac.uk/story/appreciating-community-knowledge/)Juma Ondeng is speaking specifically on the handling of cultural objects from Kenya in museums and how their order and place is informed by westernised concepts of material science (Ondeng, 2020). In the case of the Museum of the Home, only 2% of its objects are on display. What’s clear in Ondeng’s article is that with an object comes knowledge of what that object is. The information that is recorded is subject to methods of categorisation and classification usually decided by archivists, curators and documentation and record-keeping administrators. Therefore, one of the priorities in my role is to address the practices through which we catalogue stories and experiences of home life and to further divest from the eurocentrism persisting in the systems we use to record things and events. In the past, the Museum of the Home only aimed to represent the material culture of the homes of the white urban middle class which did little to address the issue of the non-representation and further marginalisation of people from racialized ethnic, migrant and working class backgrounds in museums and public galleries. The Stay Home Collection is the opportunity to build on the Museum’s more recent initiatives to reflect more on the range of home experiences and approach museum practice differently. This needs to happen with, and for, participants with regards to how they want their stories and experiences to be preserved. What’s next for the Stay Home Collection?  The Museum of the Home is working in partnership with universities, museums and others in London and Liverpool on the 'Stay home': rethinking the domestic during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this capacity, the Museum can explore home through creative and artistic expression: Artist-in-residence Alaa Alsaraji will be responding to the material collected and create a dynamic artwork display at the museum. Art and creativity are some of the key ways we can create relationships to the Museum’s collections. For contributor Chantelle Leanne, lockdown has allowed her to re-explore her artistic practice and give space to her own expression in the home.Chantelle Leanne who lives in a two-bedroom flat with her two daughters (2020)Additionally, it is the opportunity to define new approaches to the museum’s practices of cataloguing and record-keeping. This work is happening alongside participants and volunteers interested in documentation practice as well as museum workers across the sector. These conversations are not new. For example, the project Making the invisible visible: enabling audiences to ’see’ archive collections (Creative Works London, n.d) sought to develop new ways of encountering the Museum’s Documenting Homes Collection, particularly its vast photographic archive of home life. The focus on data and visualisation was studied in relation to the user’s experience with the collections management systems: the question was how these photographs could be presented in ways that are more accessible and informative. These discussions around documentation practice are about encouraging various forms of participation and engagement with museums’ knowledge systems and to enable new relationships with the stories and information they hold. For me, the Stay Home Collection volunteer program is a channel to critically think about access, information-safeguarding, the process of cataloguing, the use of terminology and more. Through these ongoing collaborations and exchanges with project participants, artists, cultural producers, researchers and museum workers, the Stay Home collection can live to be a breathing resource that responds, adapts and reflects the changing ways that society, communities and individuals are relating to home. Bibliography Bail for Immigration Detainees (2020) Detention and deportation during Covid-19: What the Figures Tell Us. [online] Available at: https://www.biduk.org/articles/721-detention-and-deportation-during-covid-19-what-the-figures-tell-us (Accessed 21 June 2021)Creative Works London (n.d) Geffrye Museum and Queen Mary University of London: Making the invisible visible: enabling audiences to ’see’ archive collections [online] Available at: http://www.creativeworkslondon.org.uk/creative_voucher/geffrye-museum-and-queen-mary-university-of-london/ [Accessed 21 June 2021]Debono, S (2021). Collecting Pandemic Phenomena: Reflections on Rapid Response Collecting and the Art Museum. Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archive Professionals, p.102-112https://europepmc.org/article/PMC/PMC7871047Ondeng, J. (2020) Appreciating Community Knowledge. [online] Available at: https://www.horniman.ac.uk/story/appreciating-community-knowledge/ [Accessed 21 June 2021]Sobande, F. (2020). “We’re all in this together”: Commodified notions of connection, care and community in brand responses to COVID-19. European Journal of Cultural Studies, p.1033-1037https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1367549420932294Stay Home Stories podcast (2021) Episode 1. [online] Available at: https://www.stayhomestories.co.uk/listen/episode-1 [Accessed 21 June 2021].


The Stay Home Collection is a digital collecting project that documents how people’s experiences of home life and home making have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Since its launch in April 2020, over 400 stories have been submitted, each reflecting on how the pandemic and the restrictions it imposed have reshaped the realities lived within, outside and around the home. The analysis and display of material in the Stay Home Collection is a core part of the Documenting Home strand of the AHRC Stay Home Stories project. The project’s first podcast features compelling voices of experiences of staying home during the pandemic. 

With ‘Stay Home’ stories, the Museum can reveal and rethink what home means through active engagement with personal testimony. The personal animates the lens through which these stories are told. The stories submitted respond to different aspects of home life - where people live, what type of housing they inhabit, how their use of the space and how the day-to-day has (or hasn’t) changed due to lockdown. Contributors makes sense of how their lives around work, education, health and community are transformed as a result of the Stay Home mandate.

The following testimonies all share an idea of what home means and how it has changed during the pandemic – home having become a multifunctional space, a place for retreat and renewed comfort, somewhere to belong for the first time after a long time or a network for support and organised care. 

Simon who lives in a flat 

My home has always been my sanctuary and is now more than ever. I like being home and am lucky to have space and interests to keep me happily indoors. Being a frontline health worker is exhausting right now and home represents a space away from all of that.

Kate who lives in a semi-detached house 

We have a living/dining room that’s our main living space - and now it’s everything: where we eat, play, exercise and work. The dining room table doubles up as a school desk, a place to draw and bake.


Tony S who lives in a retirement flat 

“When I first moved here, a few months after my wife died after 50 years of sharing a home this was just a place to live, not a home that I felt comfortable in, a place to return to after being out.  I think the place has lost a bit of its neutrality, its original impersonal character. It feels more 'mine' now, reflecting all my activities.”

Jake who lives on a council estate 

“About 10 years ago the local T&RA on the Pelican Council Estate opposite our house became “Pelican Plus” - inviting the streets bordering the estate to become part of the group. I’ve been on the committee there ever since (…) So during lockdown we’ve been organising food parcels for vulnerable residents who have slipped through the net (…) The committee have regular Zoom meetings and a WhatsApp group (…) We make a point of speaking to people on the street. It was already a friendly road. It has become more so.” 

The material is collected – digital images, audio and written testimonies – through an online questionnaire accessible on the museum website.  The ways in which these stories are collected match the urgency to document the rapid changes happening across a spectrum of home settings. One of the Collection’s features is the use of a rapid response collecting model. It consists of ‘collecting in-the-moment’ to document socio-political and cultural changes that are playing out in the present. The rapid response collecting model was conceived by the New York Historical Society in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in 2001: the initiative was rooted in the immediacy and necessity of collecting material from the events as the phenomenon was unfolding (Debono, 2021 https://europepmc.org/article/PMC/PMC7871047). In the case of the Stay Home Collection, this model has encouraged widespread participation in the UK as well as abroad. It also encourages contributors to speak on the events that particularly marked their home. One event that comes up in some of the stories is the Thursday night Clap for Carers:

Onjali Rauf who lives in a terraced house in East London

“My street is full of families from all walks of life - English, Chinese, Somali, Pakistani, Indian, Bengali, Turkish, Nigerian, Kenyan, Polish, French. Whilst none of us know each other intimately, we know who is who and belongs to which house, and the recent Thursday night 'Clap for the NHS and Key Workers' events have been lovely in bringing us together.”


I now want to consider the ways in which the material from this digital collecting project can expand and animate critical debates about how the Museum approaches and defines home. The Stay Home Collection highlights the need to engage with different expressions of home life and think critically about how we develop our understanding of home in relation to wider social, political and media discourse. More than a year on since the first lockdown, we are more keenly aware about the disparities between the ideal conceptions of home and its lived realities. Indeed, when lockdown restrictions were first imposed, the relationship between Covid-19 and the home assumed that every household was somehow affected by the pandemic and that the crisis was a unifying force. Public messaging such as “we’re all in this together” deployed by government and the media suggested that the crisis was experienced in the same ways across Britain. Educator, researcher, and scholar-activist Francesca Sobande (2020) examines how brands’ framing of the pandemic produced commodified notions of connectivity, care and community to (re)present their products, services and themselves as being essential, ethical and invested in people (Sobande 2020 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1367549420932294).Sobande rightly asks: “Who is the ‘we’ in ‘we’re all in this together?” and argues that the appeal to emotion, compassion, shared responsibility in marketing material obfuscates structural inequalities directly affecting different homes.

 If anything, the Stay Home mandate has highlighted key issues faced by people and communities around the access to liveable housing, work and job security as well as the access to physical and mental healthcare services. When I was asked about the current gaps in the collection on the Stay Home Stories podcast, I talked through my own experience in which, at the start of the pandemic, staying home was not an option (Stay Home Stories, 2021). “That idea of home not being the only place I’m at or can be” complicates the narrative of home particularly for individuals and communities who are most vulnerable to structural violence and socio-economic disparities. It complicates the very nature of home itself in Britain where the hostile environment has justified the persistence of home raids and deportations during a pandemic and lockdown restrictions (BID, 2020). It’s hard to talk about home without considering how legacies of empire, colonialism and racism play out in the question of who has a claim to home. According to Sobande, what’s even more telling is how similar rhetoric has been used to justify austerity measures in 2010. Therefore, an approach that universalises the notion of home cannot honour the multiplicity of home in how people define and build it in times of crisis.  The Stay Home Collection can help us think about the unequal bearing of the Stay Home imperative and the ambivalence of the “we” in our framing of solidarity and collectiveness during the pandemic. The rapid collecting project should function to inspire different meanings and representations of home as well as provoke and critique established notions of home life within public and national discourse. 

What other considerations motivate this rapid response collecting project? Making sense of home has been about asking people what it is like and giving the space to share some thoughts and document the experiences for themselves. The relationship between the collecting project and its participants is central to how we understand who and what constitutes the museum’s collections. Indeed, without people’s readiness to participate and share, this collection would simply not exist. In my position as Documentation Assistant, it is important for me to approach the process of documenting this time as something we do collectively. In turn, this can inform how the Stay Home stories are preserved and transmitted in the present and into the future. In incorporating the Stay Home stories into the Museum’s collections, I think we need to look more closely at how we make sense of them in museum databases. In an article for the Horniman Museum & Gardens, Community Action Researcher Juma Ondeng thinks about the nature of museum databases and how they promote inaccessible forms of knowledge production and record-keeping:

“As long as museum databases in the western world remained shrouded in secrecy, so many assumptions will be made as to the nature of collections in them and how they were acquired […] By appreciating community knowledge regarding these objects we are, in a way, entering a new era of understanding objects. This is in big contrast to the past relationships in which the curators from western museums tended to prescribe ways of understanding African objects.” (Ondeng, 2020 https://www.horniman.ac.uk/story/appreciating-community-knowledge/)

Juma Ondeng is speaking specifically on the handling of cultural objects from Kenya in museums and how their order and place is informed by westernised concepts of material science (Ondeng, 2020). In the case of the Museum of the Home, only 2% of its objects are on display. What’s clear in Ondeng’s article is that with an object comes knowledge of what that object is. The information that is recorded is subject to methods of categorisation and classification usually decided by archivists, curators and documentation and record-keeping administrators. Therefore, one of the priorities in my role is to address the practices through which we catalogue stories and experiences of home life and to further divest from the eurocentrism persisting in the systems we use to record things and events. In the past, the Museum of the Home only aimed to represent the material culture of the homes of the white urban middle class which did little to address the issue of the non-representation and further marginalisation of people from racialized ethnic, migrant and working class backgrounds in museums and public galleries. The Stay Home Collection is the opportunity to build on the Museum’s more recent initiatives to reflect more on the range of home experiences and approach museum practice differently. This needs to happen with, and for, participants with regards to how they want their stories and experiences to be preserved. 

What’s next for the Stay Home Collection?  The Museum of the Home is working in partnership with universities, museums and others in London and Liverpool on the 'Stay home': rethinking the domestic during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this capacity, the Museum can explore home through creative and artistic expression: Artist-in-residence Alaa Alsaraji will be responding to the material collected and create a dynamic artwork display at the museum. Art and creativity are some of the key ways we can create relationships to the Museum’s collections. For contributor Chantelle Leanne, lockdown has allowed her to re-explore her artistic practice and give space to her own expression in the home.

Chantelle Leanne who lives in a two-bedroom flat with her two daughters (2020)

Additionally, it is the opportunity to define new approaches to the museum’s practices of cataloguing and record-keeping. This work is happening alongside participants and volunteers interested in documentation practice as well as museum workers across the sector. These conversations are not new. For example, the project Making the invisible visible: enabling audiences to ’see’ archive collections (Creative Works London, n.d) sought to develop new ways of encountering the Museum’s Documenting Homes Collection, particularly its vast photographic archive of home life. The focus on data and visualisation was studied in relation to the user’s experience with the collections management systems: the question was how these photographs could be presented in ways that are more accessible and informative. These discussions around documentation practice are about encouraging various forms of participation and engagement with museums’ knowledge systems and to enable new relationships with the stories and information they hold. For me, the Stay Home Collection volunteer program is a channel to critically think about access, information-safeguarding, the process of cataloguing, the use of terminology and more. Through these ongoing collaborations and exchanges with project participants, artists, cultural producers, researchers and museum workers, the Stay Home collection can live to be a breathing resource that responds, adapts and reflects the changing ways that society, communities and individuals are relating to home.


Bibliography 

Bail for Immigration Detainees (2020) Detention and deportation during Covid-19: What the Figures Tell Us. [online] Available at: https://www.biduk.org/articles/721-detention-and-deportation-during-covid-19-what-the-figures-tell-us (Accessed 21 June 2021)

Creative Works London (n.d) Geffrye Museum and Queen Mary University of London: Making the invisible visible: enabling audiences to ’see’ archive collections [online] Available at: http://www.creativeworkslondon.org.uk/creative_voucher/geffrye-museum-and-queen-mary-university-of-london/ [Accessed 21 June 2021]

Debono, S (2021). Collecting Pandemic Phenomena: Reflections on Rapid Response Collecting and the Art Museum. Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archive Professionals, p.102-112

https://europepmc.org/article/PMC/PMC7871047

Ondeng, J. (2020) Appreciating Community Knowledge. [online] Available at: https://www.horniman.ac.uk/story/appreciating-community-knowledge/ [Accessed 21 June 2021]

Sobande, F. (2020). “We’re all in this together”: Commodified notions of connection, care and community in brand responses to COVID-19. European Journal of Cultural Studies, p.1033-1037

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1367549420932294

Stay Home Stories podcast (2021) Episode 1. [online] Available at: https://www.stayhomestories.co.uk/listen/episode-1 [Accessed 21 June 2021].