WHEREING: A Podcast about Belonging and Design

A seventh generation descendent of family who lived in Sefad, Israel, the city where mystical scholars of the Kabbalah found refuge in the 16th Century; Nili Portugali is an architect, filmmaker and author. We discuss her film “And the Alley She Whitewashed in Light Blue”, a stunning, poetic, visual masterpiece of the seasonal rituals in her Grandmother Rivka’s hotel, at the end of an alley in that old city. The film is one of her many works which seek to find a universal answer to the questi...

Born in Germany, post World War II, as part of the generation with the ‘grace of late births’, Dagmar Richter describes the impact of that context and time on her work, identity and places she has since lived. She talks about engagement and discourse in her work as an architect and educator, as the necessary antithesis of the wall of silence she experienced when young. Her work deconstructs, exposes and reveals what is often uncomfortable, or what she calls ‘not smooth’.

Boedi Widjaja is a prolific, international artist whose work is deeply tied to his personal experience of an itinerant childhood in Southeast Asia. Impacted by the region’s complicated entangled histories, his poetic art explores themes of diaspora, memory, cultural hybridity, identity and space.

Imagine a radical school curriculum where 4 and 5 year old children are required to visit the homes of every student in the class. I speak with Sarah Leibowits, a lower school educator at the Manhattan Country School in New York, who has taken her class on these very home visits for 20 years. Established as a 'private school with a public mission’, lessons at the school from kindergarten through 8th grade, are built on the celebration of unique difference.

This is the FInal Episode of Season 1! To all listeners, THANK YOU! From starting this naive experiment, during the pandemic, from my home, it amazes me that I have listeners all over the United States and the world. Wow! I am taking a break over the summer, and will return in September. This episode gives you some short Season 1 highlight clips, and ‘behind the scenes’ info about the Whereing Podcast. It is part of a recent talk about the podcast I was invited to give to the Pratt Ins...

‘Mother Tongue’. What does it mean? Is it the spoken language of home, the language of parents, ancestors, and country of origin? Is the language of place, a rooted connection to heritage, tradition, people, music, rituals, religion? The DNA of a particular ethnic experience? ‘Mother Tongue’ merges the past and present, a sometimes invisible gift of identity, particularly when displaced in another land. Felema Yemaneberhan grew up in Los Angeles, but throughout her childhood she w...

As a child, Lori felt most at home sitting and napping under her mother’s baby grand piano. She says, when her mother played, ‘the notes rained down on me, and became a part of my flesh’. A multi-talented force herself, Lori experienced a period of homelessness, which has shaped her creative process. When Lori speaks about home, she speaks about the ‘molten lava of truth’, rather than rigid structure. Home, in the most positive and present sense, is not ‘Pleasantville’. We speak about f...

Clement Luk Laurencio is a storyteller and master artisan of pencil drawings. His surreal, poetic drawings capture the dreams, inventions, memories and flashbacks of places he has lived, visited and cherished. He calls them ‘spatial fictions’. He says they are an invitation for pause, and wandering, in its timeless labyrinth. He probes the question ‘how is the dwelling a place of reverie and protection for the dreamer?’ His work, which has won numerous awards, depicts themes of the pandemic; ...

I speak with CHRYSTIE SHERMAN, a photographer who documents the loss and disappearance of Jewish communities. Coinciding with the beginning of the Jewish Passover holiday, her art captures themes of exodus, migration, nomadic wandering, and the longing for a homeland .... universal questions, very much alive today.

What does it mean to live on the edge? Jerry Roback is most comfortable describing himself as a wild man, a humanitarian adventurer, a self appointed and fearless, grass roots citizen of compassionate service. He seeks to create an ‘oasis’ - the calm, magic, rescue, and sanctuary, where need reveals itself in spontaneous encounters. That is his home.

In the week of his 90th Birthday, I spoke to Yi Fu Tuan, a Chinese scholar and philosopher. He invented the phrase ‘humanist geography’ as a way to explore "how geography reveals the quality of awareness’. He writes about the contradictions of space and place as the necessary tension of the human experience for both freedom and security..... for movement and pause. With simple personal stories and observations, we are led us into his world.

WHEREING explores ‘where we are’. Like clothing, we are ‘WHEREING’ (wear-ing) our spaces. Hosted by architect/designer/professor Nina Freedman, these are mindful conversations about BELONGING, SPACE AND DESIGN. Where Are You? is a basic existential question. Where do you belong? Where are you most yourself? Where is home? Does home witness you? Your soul is an intimate, soft witness to places in your memory, and the stories that unfold to curate the arc of your...