The colective Turkish home in viena: aesthetic naratives of migration and belonging

Abstract

This article explores how Turkish people in Vienna create a collective sense of belonging and position themselves in a complex web of diasporic relations, through the materiality and aesthetics of their homes. It aims to show how the efforts of displaced people to construct a belonging to the new place of dwelling are intertwined with the aesthetic and material practices of making homes. Based on ethnographic research, it will be argued that a particular "Turkish home" is collectively created through shared aesthetic practices and discourses and serves as a material and social medium both for imagining and building collectivities and for constructing and expressing ambiguities, conflicts, multiplicities and contests, played out in the aesthetics of the everyday. Challenging the common view that homes in diasporic or migratory resettlements reflect past lives and locations or a mixture of two cultures and two sets of different objects associated with them, it will be argued that Turkish homes in Vienna are made through a new and particular aesthetic, which serves to produce and reproduce a communal Turkish narrative of migration to and dwelling in Vienna. © BERG 2010.