12/04/2026
Dwelling isn’t just about where we live, it’s how we live, make, remember, and belong.
"Dwelling Otherwise: Material Practice, Natality, and the Contestation of Philosophical Space" by Gina Hochstein is an essay that explores how philosophy is not only written but also worn, built, and practised in everyday life. Drawing on thinkers such as Heidegger, Arendt, and Bachelard, it asks: what happens when we shift our focus from abstract ideas to material experience?
Through jewellery and the reimagining of the modernist picture window, space becomes intimate, embodied, and political. Transparency becomes exposure. Structure becomes constraint. And making becomes a way of thinking.
At the centre are women practitioners in Titirangi, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, whose work challenges dominant narratives of modernity and opens up new ways of dwelling — grounded in care, collectivity, and creative agency.
This is philosophy not as distance, but as encounter. Not as theory alone, but as something lived, contested, and felt.
To read more, head to the link in our bio.
{Material practice, natality, philosophical space, Heidegger, Arendt, Bachelard, Philosophy, modernism, art, aesthetics, care, creative agency, tradition, lived philosophy}
