Would you give up your house to live in a mobile home?

Freiheim documents the lives of women across Germany who chose to make a vehicle their fulltime home. Through collaborative portraiture and reportage, I explored their intimate spaces and landscapes, trying to understand what “van life” looks like when not filtered by social media and advertisements, but most of all, why it represents a dream for many.

Contemporary nomadism is a growing in Europe, inspired by concerns that are as much sociopolitical as existential. Freedom and security, change and permanence, nature and comfort are some of the conflicting needs which animate us as human beings. At the same time, we live in a society which continues to foster consumerist habits, while the housing crisis, climate change and a post-pandemic reevaluation of our way of life steer in the opposite direction.

The women I met, all different in age and background, seek their own balance in such contradictions by making a radical choice, even more unconventional when made by a mature single woman: to give up most of their possessions and to adapt to only a few square meters of living space. That they can park anywhere. Practical circumstances might have influenced their choice, but they were always guided by inner urgencies: to live more intuitively and intensively, more attuned to nature and to their own basic needs. To widen their perspective and, ultimately, to reshape their own idea of happiness.

“Freiheim” is a fantasy word. It follows the rules of compound nouns’ formation in German by merging the words “Frei” (“free”) and “Heim” (“home”), while also resembling “Freiheit”, “freedom”.

Always on the road, the women I portrayed embrace life’s intrinsic transience in a journey both physical and mental. I was allowed to accompany them for a short time in their search for individual freedom and self-determination, attempting to transport the viewer into their reality, their dream.