Once upon a time

""Once upon a time, my home was my castle"" refers to both the beginning of a fairy tale and the well-known proverb. The illuminated abstraction of a house draws on the “Nikolaus Problem”, where a person usually a child, has to draw the Nikolaus puzzle without lifting the pencil off the paper or going along the same line twice. As the house is drawn, the rhyme “Das ist das Haus vom Nikolaus” (""this is the house of Nicholas”) is chanted at a rate of one stroke per syllable. This installation deals with the emotional security one may have experienced in childhood connected to the specific place, the home. The Handwriting consists of a collection of Google results based on the search “Heimat ist...” (""home is...""). The results are as numerous as they are eclectic and indicate the problem of how to define the German term “Heimat”