I had always felt like a nomad, searching for a place to belong. Travel carried me across countries and landscapes, not only through airports and roads, but into the intimate interiors of people’s lives—their homes. These dwellings were never just structures. They were living expressions of culture, memory, labour, and place. I became attuned to how homes held stories in their walls, inscribed in stone, clay, timber, or corrugated tin. Kitchens revealed social orders. The placement of light, the presence or absence of shared space, how rooms opened or closed—all offered insight into how people lived, gathered, and cared. The daily rituals of sweeping a courtyard, tending a garden, storing firewood or grain were labours of care. These acts, often quiet and repetitive, shaped everyday life. Inside and out, homes were maintained through routines that reflected gender roles, class, and cultural expectations. These tasks, mostly carried by women, were rarely named but deeply formative. Homes were places of both pride and pressure, containers of tenderness and control, of inclusion and exclusion. Some offered warmth and freedom. Others held tight to boundaries. Yet all seemed to carry a kind of atmosphere, a somatic signature I could feel in my body (Fig. 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 and 9.4).