The concept of home is fluid and unstable. An extension of the psyche, an oppressive place, a cherished memory, or an imagined space, the home can be found in our own body, in the native land, or far from our country of birth.
After leaving Caracas, Venezuela, to study at Central Saint Martins, Daniela Benaim began asking herself ‘what is home?’ Titled La Casa, the house in Spanish, the body of work centres around the relationship between place, body and self. Daniela collaborated with photographers and creatives in both Caracas and London, her two homes, to explore multiple notions of the house. Using masks and dolls made with found objects and second-hand clothes — rags with holes, dust and odours that like the house and body show signs of time —, the images examine themes of identity, alienation, migration, loneliness and nostalgia.  
The result is seven individual publications that investigate the experience of home: Body as Home, Home as a Metaphor of the Mind, Home as an Extension of the Self, Home as Prison, Home in the Exile, Homeland and Non-Home.
The film ‘Home as an extension of the self’ focuses on the relationship between women and the domestic space, and its subversion.  Inspired by Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque, it investigates the process of ageing and decay through the presence of holes, stains and smells in the house, the subject, and the clothes.