Alice

3:54 min

The house where I grew up is bright orange. When I was a kid and I was drawing my house, I was always scared of painting it orange because I thought no one would believe me. So I wouldn’t color it and I wouldn’t draw the front, or I would make only the roof orange and leave the rest blank. In the end it allowed me to save my felt pens, which is nice when you’re a kid.
The house is big because we are a family of five, and still today I think that it is the perfect house. Not because it is particularly beautiful, it’s not: like in every house there is ugly wallpaper somewhere. But what I really like is the way it is organized.
Here is my room, there is a big window, huge even, and I was always scared that my neighbors might see me. Besides that I never really knew whether from the street people could see me or not. Here is my brother’s bedroom, here is my other brother’s bedroom, and my parents’ bedroom can’t be seen from the front. Here are some stairs.
What I like about this house, and what you can’t see from here, is its organization. In most houses, I guess, all the common spaces like the kitchen and the living room would be downstairs, and the bedrooms and bathrooms would be upstairs. I don’t think that this is so great. In my house the rooms are all mixed. For instance here is my bedroom, here’s my brother’s (that’s the first floor, I’ll write “bedroom”), and next to that is the kitchen, which is convenient if you are hungry in the middle of the night, you can go straight to the kitchen; and there is also the living room on this floor, and on the upper floor there are again more bedrooms. This is nice because it allows everyone to have some personal living space, but also it is handy to share spaces without being too close to each other. In most flats people absolutely want to split the night and day, and that doesn’t really make sense to me.
I am a bit scared that in my life I won’t ever find a house or a place to live as good as this house that I had. But maybe at the same time I need to distance myself from it, because it was the house from the time when I grew up, and I left; so maybe I need to move on. But still, I love it very much.

Anaïs

5:01 min

I grew up in Switzerland near Vevey, close to the mountains. We had a huge and pretty old house. I begin with the drawing of the house. I do it a little bit the way I drew it when I was a child and teachers asked us to do it. There were some stairs. My mum sat always on this stairs to smoke her cigarettes and to look at her garden. In front of the house, there was the garden with a lot of flowers, it wasn’t really perfect because the garden was messy.
My room was on this floor, upstairs. My brother had the bigger room where we played together most of the time. His room was there, here is the wall between our rooms. Upstairs was the room of our parents with the nice balcony.
My parents have always lived here. It didn’t change. But they built an extension, it looked a little bit crazy, on the front of the house. There are the windows ... and the roof with the chimney … grossomodo, so it is …
My parents bought this house because it was pretty, not that expensive. We lived in a village where there is nothing to do. Here is the front door. They bought it because there was a huge garden. It was after we spent a weekend in the mountains. We played outside a lot, we climbed the big old trees. That was really funny.
Next to the garden, there were some cows. Or some horses … no it was horses actually. the farmer from the corner owned them. And we had some weird neighbours on the other side. And they have also always lived here.
From the inside, it is pretty nice. Because some friends, who are artists, renovated the interior and now everything is round. They are ecological housebuilders and they only use eco material. Every wall is differently coloured. They made a strange bar for the kitchen.
The rest is made from wood (because it’s in Switzerland). That’s a beam … It’s crooked and narrow. Here we listened to music, here is the stereo. It’s comfortable. Also when I go back now I feel good, even if it’s far away from everything. Brickwall.
There is a mixture, it’s a special house. And there is the forest here. I’ll draw le chaussin. Le chaussin is the forest. Actually it is on the other side, but it doesn’t matter. That was the view, there are the mountains, the Alpes, with the skilifts … And the lake on this side, le lac Léman.

Angela

4:29 min

I’m not going to talk exactly about the place where I really grew up, because it still exists. It’s in Paris and it is not very original. So, I prefer to talk about the place where I spent my holidays since I was young. It’s a little funny because it’s a place a little … how can I say … a little romanesque because it’s an old mill over water. It´s located in Aveyron, a very beautiful region, bordering Aveyron and Gard, in the Larzac. There’s nothing around the mill, until you’ve crossed 13 kilometers. nothing except nature. Here it is, these are the waves. Since it’s a watermill it’s near a river obviously. I have difficulties to draw it, but anyway. So, it's a very beautiful place, quite rustic. there is a swimming pool, that I’m just drawing, but the swimming pool doesn't make you wanna get in because the water is always so cold and nobody cleans it, so it's not nice to get in.
At the end of the alley behind the swimming pool, which is lined with flowers, there is a pétanque area and this is so cool. And there are some stairs, like that, which are going down, this leads to a little … kind of a little private beach, but in reality it’s not a luxury place, it is just very sympathic but not precious at all. This little private beach leads to the river, which is in each case, a very beautiful river. I have to admit this, because the water is very clear and everything.
So it is very cool, you feel like in Amazonia there … Amazonia’s rivers aren’t so transparent but anyway. So there is … what I’m drawing is not so clear but it is clear in my head anyway. It is difficult to have a correct view on it. There are some little rocks there, like that … hop hop hop, there it is. There is the little door that leads to the private beach … and there are some trees of course – it would be sad if not. But drawing trees is not so easy. Here are a lot of trees! But big trees, because those are the ones that give shade over the swimming pool, so we know those trees! It’s because of them, that the swimming pool’s water is so cold. And there is water, here is the river, here are a lot of trees too. On my drawing it seems ugly but in reality it is very pretty.
And on the other side, there is the jardin de curé (the priest’s garden) I don’t know why it is named like that, must have been a priest once there. And once, the neighbour from above, who used to have his parking lot here … – okay, there is a neighbour, but in reality nobody cares, he’s never around! So that man had once parked his car in his parking lot and the car just ended up in the priest’s garden, so that was kind of funny as a story like “a car just landed in the garden!”. Anyway that makes me laugh. And there are again trees and trees, what I just draw doesn’t look like trees but …
There are again some stairs that again lead to the river, that means the other side of the river, and this is the waterfall, these are rocks, and there it is. Because there is a lot of nature, we fish some tadpoles. By fishing I mean nothing mean, we just can watch them grow that way and it is incredible to see a tadpole growing up, because it becomes a frog and this is fascinating!
And there is … it doesn’t look like that at all in reality, but … In real life it is so pretty that there are a lot of postcards in the région of Aveyron that just show the house and the mill which is named le moulin de Gardies (with southern France accent) and there it is. And so, maybe I’m going to stop here because my drawing doesn’t look good, but I hope you got an idea of my home in your head. I’m over.

Clémence

7:01 min

I grew up at Palaiseau, it’s in the suburbs of Paris. To enter my house, is a bit complicated, we need to take stairs with an old rusty doorway which makes noise brrr brrr brrr. Here we have a big tree that I like a lot and my father wanted to cut it down but thankfully he likes me and he kept it. Here, when you walk just before arriving at the house there is also a swing. Swinging was my favorite activity. There was also a little path, pouf. And here, once again, there are stairs, to walk up and now we get to the house. The stairs can be used both ways.
There you go, there’s my path and my house, pouf. So … here is my living room which is also the lunch room. Here we eat, here we watch TV. We can enter here or there. Here is the shower, there’s the bathroom, that’s my daddy’s bedroom, a door, here is the toilet where we can make a pee-pee, here is a kitchen with a door here, there are stairs that turn a little bit on the end. Hop, you can go up this way, and here are also stairs but from underneath. We’ll get into it later.
So, here is the kitchen. And this is a beautiful hallway with a really really beautiful floor. I mean I like it even if it has the same color as vomit but it’s also nice. So, this is the place where we live. I come back, I’m often going to the bathroom. From the living room I go into the kitchen to eat, so here is the fridge, and then I go up. Here, we turn. We’re going upstairs. Here was the first… This was the ground floor. Now we’re going on the first floor. So we come approximately from here – there is a big hallway now. This is the hallway. With bookcases everywhere, they block the avenue, you can’t walk. Here, is my door, I have a giant bedroom, super big.
This is my bedroom, where I have two beds, wardrobes, a window with a small balcony. That’s really necessary. I can enjoy the view on the street, so everybody sees me naked but I like it. Here, is my sister’s bedroom, with a double bed. We have to go through her bedroom to go into the bathroom. Instead of having a shower we even have a bathtub.
So, I go on drawing because if I stop you can’t see anything. This is a bed. With a small window which shows the garden, and here it’s weird, my brother doesn’t have a bedroom that big … I made a mistake! It’s smaller upstairs. Here we have a little office which is kind of a mess, with bookcases, desks, stuff and here is my brother’s bedroom with a bed, a desk and a window which shows the view. And here is a wooden floor, a beautiful wooden floor. There you go. So here you have small windows which show the view into the garden.
In the garden you can see a beautiful cherry tree. To access the garden it´s best to start from ground level. So when you are in the kitchen, you can take the stairs. You go down, down, this is the stairs, you go down. There we are. And here you can see a door. Here, that’s a bit funny, you have a small kind of stage, very weird. So, there we are in the basement, it’s cold, bvvvvv, here you do the washing, you hang the laundry, and there is the laundry, here is my father’s workshop, where he has all the DIY stuff, where it’s dirty, and you put on overalls. It was one of my favorite rooms when I was a kid because it is the pantry, and there are always plenty of things, kind of amazing. Here is the gaming mess. A mess of every game we ever had, every comic, everything – everything lies around, it is a huge mess. Here, we have steps again, everywhere, to go to my garden, a huge garden, here is a superb cherry tree, here is a little fence built by my father and the neighbor, here are some huts in the garden, with the biking mess, the gardening mess, and then – BE CAREFUL with the door to go to the garden, because it is really small, it’s three times smaller than we are, so I once banged, and I hurted my head.

Janitta

3:16 min

Well, I remember living in a place that was pretty small and pretty poor when I was young. And I remember the rooms, basically there were three rooms. The first one was the biggest room of all the rooms, my parents’s room; the kitchen in length and the living room. With two beds in my parents’s room and one in the living room. Just close to it in the same area, my parents were sewing with other people. So, along this room there were a lot of machines. And at this time, I remember being close to our neighbors. So maybe to this side, I don’t really remember … And there was a large door where we could access to the outside. So there was a big corridor here, and I remember that I was fighting a lot with my big sister. We used to play a lot outside, and I was … I think I was in love with a little boy who was living close to us, our neighbor. And we used to go out this way because there was … a lot of space. Further out, there was sort of a waterfall, installed for kids to play, here. And this is it … There was also an eyeglasses shop where my mom’s friend worked together with her daughter. And the train station was in that direction.

Juliette

8:08 min

Ok, so I grew up in several houses, they were very different from one and another but they were always in the same neighborhood.
The first one was on rue de l’Aspirant d’Argent, in Levallois Perret. It’s the first one I remember. So there was my little brother’s bed, which was like this. Because he was a baby at that time and I was two years old. And to me, my room was like the one for a princess in cartoons, but in reality it might have been far less stylished, but anyway, I don’t know. For what I remember so far there were the curtains, I thought the bed was for two and it was like this and I was very fond of my sheets because there were flowers on it. My bed was like this and here was a great wardrobe with a mirror on it. There was something very important, two objects very important … well ok, three. There was my little teddy bear, hop, I called him minin bourru and I still have him … hop, it was like this: my mother used to sew it in my pockets when I was scared to go to school without my official teddy bear who was called Nan-Nan. And he looked like this. Looks like this, because I still have him. I won’t draw him entirely. And there was also a little fairy which was like this. I don’t know where it comes from but I still have it, too. It had flowers like this, here is some fabric. It was like this. And it had some glitters here and it was very good because in front of this mirror I was always when I disguised with a friend who came to play with me, I put some glitter on me. Well, I have this kind of memory, voilà. These are objects I don’t really know where they came from but but they are always with me, they are a bit my grigri (talisman) if I can say.
And after living in the rue de l’Aspirant d’Argent, we were still living in Levallois, and we moved to a flat located in 102 rue du Président Wilson. It was wonderful because my father, he … well, we could see the Eiffel Tower from the window and my father had a remote control and he would, every evening, … there was the ray of light of the Eiffel Tower passing by, and every night my father pressed a button to make us believe he controlled the light of the Eiffel Tower to make it shine in our living room. Voilà, these were cool moments. And it was a great building … there was a very good sofa on which we loved to play with my little brother. And in my room there was a carpet, a grey carpet and … well, a bit salt and pepper. It was very ugly, I hated it. And there was a bunk bed. It was the first time we had one.
After the rue du Président Wilson we moved to Levallois again, and it was rue de Villiers. It was a flat which had scars in the wall and it was very damp and my mother was always upset because it screwed her that there were scars in the wall. But in any case the flat was not basically very clean. But there was something crazy for me in the kitchen, it was something small, like … I don’t know how to call it, when the bin is related … well, like a place where you can put your rubbish and ends directly in the common trash of the building and it was awesome. So it was something like this and there was a system to make the rubbish go down in the common trash directly. But sometimes, rubbish would block the pipe and it stank, so we stoped quite quickly to use it. In this flat was something wonderful, a corridor leading behind the living room. Hop hop hop, here is the table. And the rest of the living room is here, with, I don’t know … some chairs, like this. Me and my brother would be like little mice. When our parents got friends over for dinner, we passed by there and made jokes while they were eating. Ffff, it was super. And something very funny happened in this flat. One day my little brother went to show his bottom to a bank clerk who had an appointment with my parents at home. It was very funny. They were all in the living room, very seriously talking, and my brother came and showed his bottom to the guy and everybody was very shocked but he was laughing so hard. It was incredible, I still respect him a lot for that until today. And voilà …
After the rue de Villiers, we went to Courbevoie. It was very funny because we had a large flat, very beautiful, with a beautiful terrace. So this is the wall of the terrace. And there was something crazy: just next to the terrace there was a cemetery, so we had a huge cross like this at the top of the wall. From the cemetery right next to us, there were a lot of graves. It was not charming during winter but anyway… life was a bit sad here because everybody was bored.
And after that, we were lucky and we got a flat in Neuilly. In rue de Villiers again, the same street as the flat in which we tricked my parent’s friend or when my brother showed his bottom to the banker. I pass by this building very often, and I can’t go in and I can’t go back in this flat. I liked it and it … I find it sad every time but I get used to it. And there was a lady who had a big husky and recently I saw her with a baby husky, so I thought the big one would have died and I found it very sad. And the flat in Neuilly is very good, and a bit particular because the wall of the living room is a circle, like this. Here’s a sofa but … there’s a part of the wall which is round, so not a lot of furniture fits in but I found it very beautiful in any case. Here is a little table.
And my room … my room is my teenage room, I still have it today. There are a lot of things everywhere on the wall. Very ugly and useless, but I keep it because I like it. I even tried to do tags, but it wasn’t a successful project. There are pictures of me with my friends … I don’t know … On the door there are leftovers of a past decoration. There’s a large advertisement for Ray Ban which goes all the way down. And I sleep on a simple mattress because my bed is gone, I don’t have a bed anymore. Voilà!

Léonore

5:56 min

When I was 6 I moved to Marseilles. So what can I say? It was just really different in regards to the design of the house we lived in before. Hop, this is my garden.
So it was the first time that I had a garden. Here I spent most of my time. As it’s a very sunny town I spent hours building huts with my brother when we were younger. We used long towels, a beach umbrella and cushions … hop – like this … With trees above us, hop. We didn’t have a lawn because we didn’t prepare the ground for it. We now have concrete on it. But we got used to it. So, I put my cushions and my radio there. I had an old radio that could read tapes and CDs. Then I prepared myself delicious toasts and a big glass of squeezed orange juice. And I brought all of my comics and I made a stack of them to be sure that I could stay there forever.
Then I would spend the whole day there, but in the end it’s like the game you organize for hours when you’re a kid to finally not even play the game because the huts for example took so long to get installed with all the textiles and stuff (finally there was only one small entrance between the cushions) that … well, it was time to stop. My parents came back home or it got dark. So I got used to this moments and repeated them later for example during my studies for exams or the “bac”. I kept on working in the garden, still with my orange juice my music and my sun.
The other place I liked in my house, even though it was in Marseilles, is the living room to which I had to move to in winter. When you enter, there was the terrace, here were the windows … like this, here was some kind of arcade in granite, it was quite ugly. Before we arrived, a mason used to live here and made a lot of tacky experiments (like the granite arcade), but it’s ok we liked it there anyway. So, here was the table … not a very proper perspective, but it doesn’t matter … In this direction we had the kitchen, here at the end of the weird arcade we see the piano. My father always used this place, playing the piano all the time. I can draw him from behind, like this with his small round glasses. Usually if you came around to talk he just … didn’t answer! Until we screamed and then he would turn around.
So here is my favorite part: the couch! hop, like this, with tall bookcases because my mother is a teacher, so she collected many books during her life. Here, another couch, and the African super wobbly table. I wasn’t supposed to put my feet on it because of that. When we arrived we painted everything in orange, but it was a very nice warm and sweet orange, and tall the pillows with patterns from the Ivory Coast (my parents met there as young teachers). This cocoon is so warm during winter. Filled with music or my father playing some piano, and all the books scattered around, and we can spread our feet until … here, and read comics all day. Since we don’t have a TV, there is no other sound than the music. Over there my mother was always reading books, and we liked to have some tea here … hop, or when it’s really cold we drank hot chocolate which my father made by melting pieces of chocolate. We stayed there working or reading, listening to the same music. If we were upset or something we went back to our bedroom.
So this is somehow the only reason why I could accept wintertime: because I knew that I could go back home and eat a big snack with my father, even though he’s an adult. So that’s why I love to go back home to my parents house.

Margot

5:43 min

I have moved a lot in my life, so I don’t know which apartment to choose, but in the end I choose this one, the one when I lived in Orléans. I was four years old. I looked a bit like this … my mother used to put a bowl on my head to cut my hair. Like this. And I used to wear huge glasses, way bigger than my head, like this. With big clothes. While I was myself very small.
And I was always in a bad mood, I was always pulling a face. I moved to this flat when I was four, and before that I lived in Paris, and before Paris in another flat also in Orléans. Orléans isn’t a very big town, it’s like this, here is the Cathédrale. I lived over there for one or two years, then we moved around here, to what we call Old Orléans. My mother loved this apartment, it was her favorite one in her entire life, so she was really sad to move from here to the new flat, but myself, I liked this new apartment a lot. I keep a few memories of it, not so many, but maybe I was too small.
There was a street with paving stone (since it was in Old Orléans like I said before) and at the end of this street, with paving stone, there was the rue Jeanne d’Arc, which was like THE street, here was my school, over there. In the rue Jeanne d’Arc every year the Jeanne d’Arc parade took place.
This used to be my door, in this street called la Vieille Monnaie. This is my door.
For example, here: The day I moved in, this is me and this here is my little sister, so even smaller than I was myself. Ok, here she smiles, like this, she understood absolutely nothing. So, the day we moved in – what happened? My mother was so upset because we were always bothering her, running around etc. So she was so upset that she just left us in the front of the house waiting in the rue Vieille Monnaie’s … we had not even seen the flat yet! We were four and two years old and we decided, my sister and me, to run away from rue Jeanne d’Arc while my mother was unpacking our stuff, … we couldn’t see her. We walked down the street, and when we were about to turn at the corner – we didn’t know anything at all there, my sister just didn’t get anything – we had the best feeling of freedom! We were running away! It was amazing but … my mother went out of the house and ran after us and caught us. It was such a disappointment … that day when we nearly escaped and failed it …
But I’m gonna explain to you now what was inside the apartment, because … it was a nice flat! It was quite beautiful … (am I allowed to take another piece of paper? Hmm? No – ok it doesn’t matter, I’m gonna draw a small graphic over here). To show how it was: Actually it was great because when we enter the flat on ground level you can see: here was the door, so here we had a living room, kitchen, parents’ bedroom, office, all the boring places … but the really really really cool thing was, when we went upstairs into the exact same area (living room, kitchen, office blablabla all of this which are downstairs). There were my bedroom and my sister’s bedroom (so I’m gonna write sister’s bedroom … ok, nice) and here, a sliding door: so we had a huge space and we never saw our parents, we lived upstairs and we had a lot of fun, it was quite nice.
And one day – I didn’t look like this anymore, because I was 15 then, so I’m wearing this kind of glasses … like that, I felt like some kind of a rebel teenager, with my hair above my eyes, hop tac tac, and I was standing curved like … this, all the time, … my father got transferred to Lille. So what happened: we left this amazing flat and at the same time, Orléans. Voilà, This is me … I draw myself a few prickles even I thought I had none, that way we can understand the teenage style easier, you see?
So, I’m over with the description of my apartment.

Marlène

3:59 min

My parents bought the house we still have, when I was four years old. It's a really old house they bought it from an elderly lady. Her husband was killed in the First World War, we found some old letters from the army announcing his death to his wife. Just in front of the house we have rose trees and some nice little stones in the wall, giving an impression of an old house. When we first moved to the house, it was really small and dark, we were six with my two brothers and my little sister who wasn't born yet. We used to live on the second floor, we didn’t use the attic and the cellar which was really humid. My father decided to rebuild the house. So during this time we used to live in the little part in the back of the garden. We showered and ate there. One time we did a medieval Christmas there. It was really nice, my mum put some rags on the floor, from there we ate some middle age dishes. Now it's still the same house with stones on the front and rose trees that are dying, as they are really old now. We still have three floors, on the lowest floor there is some super design stairs, my father build them. There is also the kitchen and my father's office. On the middle floor we have the living room which is really high, and there is my room. At the top there is my little sister's room and my parent's room. Now it slowly turns empty because before, we were six people living there, now there are only three. It is big and empty, voilà.

Pauline

4:05 min

My name is Pauline. I’m going to talk to you about my house. I moved here in 1999. So it’s my old house because I have moved to an other place since, but I want to talk about this one, it’s my favorite.
It was a big house, a very big house in the suburbs of Paris (in the 91st department, even if nobody knows this department). It was a large house with a large gate, black, a bit like in a thriller; my home looked like a haunted mansion! The thing about this house was that it was built on sloping ground. It’s not very interesting, but it means that it was potentially threatened by landslide – not such a funny fact in the end! All of this to say that in 1999 there was the storm of the century, which means there was a lot of wind, and the tiles from the roof, almost all of them, were ripped off by the tempest and flew away, and we had to rebuild the roof. Since it’s my old house I have a few blanks, but I will tell you a little more.
So, here was my parents’ bedroom. It was a big room, a bit classical, (the perspective is not very…) with a bed and wooden floor, it was a very warm house that creaked from everywhere because the wood was old and alive – that’s what people kept saying and I was scared that there were ghosts. My parents were on the first floor, and my little brother and me were on the second floor, that is under the eaves: so in summer it was very hot and in winter it was very cold. Thus, when we couldn’t sleep, we would gladly go down to our parents’ bed, hide there, and ask them if they had solutions to help us sleep, but it was never easy!
Ok, it’s a little bit basic, what else can I tell you? Let’s go back to the first floor, where my parents used to sleep. If we stood there we could see the big garden from the window, and the street outside (we were not far from the train tracks but we didn't hear the trains), we saw people passing by, there were tiny stones, a swing, and trees. There were buildings across and we could say hi to our friends, it was very nice. One thing bothered me, though: when my friends were coming over, my mother enjoyed opening the gate through the automated remote … I thought it was too much and a bit ridiculous!
It was fun because a little girl flirted with my brother when she saw him walking in his underwear!
What else can I say about this house… that it was very warm and very nice. I can also describe the living room where many celebrations took place, because it might be where I spent most of my childhood as I only moved to my new house in 2010. There were great sofas next to great bookshelves. By the way, I didn’t read all of this books because I’m not a big reader. There are many novels that I still don’t know, which is cool. There was a big table where we ate a lot of good food.
Now, we live in another house which also looks like a haunted mansion. I think that’s all.

Quitterie

4:30 min

So, I live in a house which is pretty big, because I have five brothers and sisters.  My dad, my mum, and after two older brothers, then it’s me, and I have two little brothers and a little sister. So we were eight at home. My house, I always thought that it was pretty small actually. But many friends thought it was big because we were a lot of people. So I often shared my room, I shared it with my little sister, we had bunk beds. Before I shared it with my brothers. So we have many bunk beds and our bedrooms were quite big. We also had a playing room. I remember my friends said it looks like a holiday house, so we have a room, a big veranda – a veranda like this, where we always took all our meals together. But it was quite rare that we were at home all together. When there were all eight of us it felt like party time. On the veranda we had a lot of plants everywhere, cactus … Although the view is not good at all, haha … it was still very nice at home.
We had many objects, small ones, a lot of photographs everywhere, books, a lot of sofas, haha, voilà. I have good memories about my living room. Actually I have good memories of every room in the house, but the living room is a little bit like the place for the Sunday, the Sundays in November, when it’s cloudy, and we had music. My father listened to a lot of jazz and classical music, and music was everywhere in the house, with tea and my brothers who are half doing their homework … We also have many many people at home – my parents always had many friends over, and they still have.
Outside there’s a beautiful glycine, which is blooming in season. I think it blooms twice a year. So, yes, there’s a big glycine in front of the house. And the street was also very important when I was little. I didn’t have a huge garden, but we were playing in the evening, in front of the house. It’s a street in Sens Unique, so we were always skateboarding with my brothers, rollerblade, ouhla, ah ah ah, rollerblade … and riding our bikes. I didn’t like cycling a lot before I came to Strasbourg, but I started to do it a lot. We had neighbors everywhere, so it was a very vivid place, a lot of people around. We can’t see them on my drawings, it’s hard to show, always many people. Lots of my friend say it looks like a holiday house, maybe that’s because it’s never really tidy with so many people.

Valentine

3:33 min

The house where I grew up, is located in Les Landes. It was recently built by my dad and my mom, but more by my dad … It is between two cornfields, or four in fact. One on each side. One there, one there, one there, and one there. There are no neighbors, only fields. My dad decided to put a lot of pebbles in front of the house. And it is large, lost in the countryside, my room is opposite my parents’ room, so I could never call my friend or my boyfriend in the evening, which is a huge problem!
Here is the garage … that my dad built super great to put the cars in, but we put the tractor inside and the cars are in front of the house … tic … tic … tic … Often the cats come to sleep just below, like that, and sometimes on it, and it’s funny but my daddy is angry because of the fur on the body!
It is here that we return. There is my room. I have a big bed, it’s great, and I still have my dresser from when I was a child. Right here, filled with trinkets, because I love to keep what I find, I have a great collection of stuff. And there is an enormous closet where I can put all my paintings and all my clothes!

Yoon

2:52 min

I was born in Korea but I went to Canada at the age of five. So I guess I tell you about my home in Canada because that’s the first home that I remember.
With my two brothers, me and my mother, we lived in a house that was big enough for four people; but unfortunately I didn’t have a room for my own. Instead, on the bottom of our stairway, there was a small door in which there was space of one cubic meter. At that time I was five years old and I shared my room with my mother. It was the first time that I had a space for my own. It was really small. It was my very first room, where I would put all my stuff in, boxes filled with paper, pencils. It was just enough space to crouch. As an artist always needs to have a space of one’s own, that was my first personal artistic space, where I had my photos, drawings … After three years, we moved out but I don’t really remember my other homes besides this one. So I guess, this was my first room.

Zoé

2:52 min

I grew up in a flat in Paris around Place de la Nation, 11th district; it’s a former printing house and there are many windows everywhere and a glass roof, so there is a lot of light. The windows are like this … and actually there is only one big room with … it has a high ceiling, and there is the window on the ceiling with the light coming through. The backside opens on a yard… this is a radiator, haha … it opens on a backyard and just in front of the window there is a lot of greenery like this … and in summer it smells very good … and … so it’s an enormous room, very white, with parquet like this and a bog table.
The kitchen is in the same room as the living room. Here is some furniture, haha … and here is the living room, and it goes on and there is my dad’s office which is separated through a bookcase; here is a big sofa or bed where we have naps … and often with my cat, haha … here is my cat and this is my father who sleeps and in the afternoon there is the light of the sun which shines on the sofa, haha … So this is the bookcase and – oh yes and actually there are mezzanines over there … there is one which is my bedroom. When we let the roof windows open there were always cats coming in, so it was really a fight with my cat because the … kssss kssss … and now my cat is dead and we let the cats come in and now they are “friends”.
There are a few problems with noise, as it’s only one room and there are not so many doors … well in my bedroom I have a hatch … but there is a lot of light so it’s very good and … and it’s good for parties, too, because there is space … and when there is some sun in the afternoon … this is the sun… we can lay on the floor … here is another little window. We can lay down on the floor to enjoy the sun.

Colophon

Réalisé à Strasbourg en novembre 2016 à la Haute École des Arts du Rhin avec les étudiantes de deuxième année de communication

Résidences croisées Strasbourg/Stuttgart:
Christina Schmid, octobre 2016 – janvier 2017

Site web: Simon Zirkunow

Merci à
L’annee 2 de communication
Pauline Marx
Quitterie Belleau
Clémence Ferrando
Gauthier Sibillat
Markéta Magidovà
Sabine Fessler
Alexandra David
Clara Neumann