Simon James
‘I Feel You Like Home’
‘I Feel You Like Home’ is a composition by Simon James that was made to accompany the ‘All In The Same Storm’ exhibition at the De La Warr Pavillion in East Sussex. The composition weaves interviews with refugees and founder of the Refugee Buddy Project Rosanna Leal, with music that is immersive and involving. The piece invites listeners to slow down and reflect on the stories told, and offers up “some calm in the storm”..
The exhibition tells diverse stories of life under the shadow of COVID-19 through hand-stitched patchwork squares that reveal tales of resistance, change, togetherness, isolation, loss and home. The patches, once sewn together, form four large quilts: a people’s history of a pandemic that sits within the long tradition of hand-stitching as a method of narrating individual and collective life under oppressive, unsettling circumstances.
Throughout the process, participants were inspired by the Chilean practice of arpillera-making: a pictorial applique technique that involved using rags and scraps of fabric to create images that were then sewn on to large pieces of cloth. Arpilleras were usually made by women to depict daily life during times of social and political hardship, recording their oppression as an act of resistance.