What are the most important factors in defining your Identity?
What does belonging mean to you?
Share your Belongingness story with us!
"When I asked him about belonging he told me it might even be a cliché..."
"When I asked him about the feeling of belonging, he told me about the starry sky..."
"...what does Belonging mean to him, he said: that’s a much deeper question."
Our story is the story of others.
..., our genetic material, as humans, is similar in 99.9% of its content.
...individuals share 99.9% of the DNA sequence and only 0.1% of the sequence contains variations
Our genetic material passes through generations mostly without being affected by the environment...
We are Portuguese performance artist Raquel André and Mexican scientist Sandra Romero-Hidalgo. We were digitally introduced through Fuel and we quickly realized that our scientific research and artistic work and interests were very much aligned.
We understood that we could embark on a journey together that explored Sandra’s scientific genomic research and Raquel’s experience in collecting real moments of togetherness and personal stories. We decided to take commercial ancestry genetic tests to find out who our DNA relatives were and to have conversations with them around ideas of Identity, Belonging, and DNA testing.
We were surprised to learn that between ourselves we had 3,000+ global relatives. We contacted our relatives and invited them for a video call. We met a total of 20 DNA relatives and conversed about why they took the DNA test and what the experience was like for them. What did they gain? Were they surprised by the results? What were they looking for and did they find it?
Our motivation and focus has been to capture the complexity of people’s identity and our collective desire to feel connected to ourselves, our stories and background and also with one another. Coming from different professional backgrounds and life experiences ourselves, we wanted to also reflect on what Identity and Belongingness means to us.
Belongingness Talk