How Do Objects Travel?

What makes a home a home? After answers, we brought Byron and Dexter Peart — identical twins and experts on the matter — to Ace Hotel Brooklyn in October. The co-founders of Canadian purpose-minded design shop GOODEE hosted Home Away From Home at ours, delivering a week devoted to the objects, rituals and stories that solidify our sense of identity, belonging and comfort. (Find said objects now on Ace Shop.)

In addition to outfitting a suite with items from their inventory, sourced from 40+ artisan makers around the world, the Pearts joined our Artist in Residence Phoebe Tran for a special edition of Sydney Gore’s The Conversation Pit — a curated design industry live discussion series. They put their minds together in ponderance of the invisible threads that connect us across places, spaces, and cultures.

We brought them together once more for a mini bonus panel question to answer how objects travel. We found their responses thoughtful and enlightening and hope you feel similarly.

Objects and food can travel across the world now, often much further than the people who make them. When something moves from one culture or place into another, what travels with it?

Byron Peart, Co-Founder GOODEE: I think every object carries the story of its making, wherever it travels. The traditions, skills, experimentation and creativity of the person behind it. We often think of the finished object as the final expression of that journey, and rightly so. But there’s something beautiful about the fact that its story continues long after it is passed from the maker’s hands.

Once it finds its way into someone’s home, perhaps halfway around the world, it takes on a whole new life through everyday use, memories and experiences. A beautiful basket crafted in Ghana might hold a child’s toys for years, then become a planter in another room a decade later. Eventually, that same child might find a home for it in their own Brooklyn apartment, giving it yet another life and meaning.

That’s what I find so compelling about objects made with care and intention. They carry the story of where they came from, but they also collect our stories along the way. Their meaning isn’t fixed. It grows and changes as they move through time, places and generations.

Dexter Peart, Co-Founder GOODEE: I think what travels is a story. A story of the materials, the maker, the craft and the place it all began. Our creative voices know no boundaries. One thing we always love is how excited makers are to see their creations carried with care to beautiful, well-loved homes around the world. There’s something beautiful about a piece made by someone’s hands finding a home far away, where it will be loved for years by someone they may never meet.

Phoebe Tran, Artist: I often think about how food travels across borders, and how a single dish can contain ingredients from all over the world, even when its final composition is understood as belonging to one particular culture or place. The Vietnamese food I cook today is made possible by globalization, trade and the labor of countless people I may never meet. Even something as essential as fish sauce carries a history of its own, beginning with anchovies and salt harvested from the waters of Vietnam, passing through the hands of fishermen and factory workers, before traveling across the world to reach my kitchen and eventually becoming part of the food I make.

I’m equally fascinated by how plants migrate over time, taking root in new environments and becoming embedded in entirely different cultural traditions. During a recent trip to Oaxaca, I came across lemongrass in the markets and learned that it was used primarily as an herbal tea for its medicinal properties. In Vietnam, lemongrass is both a culinary and medicinal herb, and I was struck by how the same plant could hold similar significance in two places so far apart. It made me think about the ways knowledge travels alongside plants, but also how people come to understand and develop their own relationships with the plants that grow around them.

When food moves from one place to another, it carries more than just flavor. It carries the histories of migration, trade, labor, adaptation, and the many hands and traditions that have shaped it along the way.

Sydney Gore, Writer: Ideally, the craft and knowledge behind the object or dish is what travels across borders. Preserving the cultural context enables us to thoughtfully engage with these traditions from a place of respect and admiration without losing sight of where they came from. There’s a story for everything even if it’s not written in the ancient texts!

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