Claire de Laszlo Marshall is a filmmaker and textile artist based in New York. Her recent work explores the meaning of home in the context of mass migration. In residency at Catwalk, she will be working on a collection of five experimental short documentary films. The first of the five films entitled Is This Place a Home? is a meditation on the pain of forced displacement - evictions, floods, interpersonal violence - and a celebration of the creativity and beauty with which New Yorkers put down roots. The films explore how our physical environment relates to us and how people and places change each other in the homemaking process. They invite us to consider the way our personal and ancestral histories inform the way we inhabit an area and engage in candid dialogue with others who have different stories in hopes that we can collectively take responsibility for the ways we shape our environments and help each other recover a sense of agency about the idea of home.

Affiliation: Catwalk Alum-Collaborator