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this work was commissioned by Other Cinemas as part of their weekender ‘colonialism and the climate crisis in cinema’ April 2025

this project came out of a few poems that were different from my usual style but written in a space of urgency amongst the ongoing gen0c1de that is making it difficult for us to sleep and feel human. they come out of a sense of/desire for resistance, life in the face of death, love, community, space to breathe. I wanted to share them so they can be communal, so that maybe others can remix them for their own purposes too. when a friend asked me to describe some intentions for the work, I wrote intuitively ‘I mainly just want this project to give some words to people to use/adjust/repurpose as little talismans or expressions or possibilities that help with moving thru life in resistant ways.’ I hope it can be this for you i’A.

the artwork was created from scanning and remixing/chopping up a mix of family archive photography and my own film photography. there are some notes at the bottom of this page to accompany one of the visual works.

you can download a copy of the full zine below, there is also a more visually accessible version and a photobook version of just the images. I would love to hear your thoughts or experiences with the work. thank you for being here

more accessible version if reading on blank background/larger font size is preferable (alt text on the way):

photobook edition to view the artwork alone:

The doorways, windows and walls here span the early 90s, late 90s, early 2000s and 2020s. They span movements between the village, the city, the UK as promised land and where a family was unexpectedly made. The makings and unmakings of home with unexpected people and the unexpected consequences. The village, seen in the mango leaf garlands that are hung on doorways during auspicious occasions to ward off evil spirits, the first flat my family lived in in the city which I didn’t visit but am able to occupy by spending time with images, scanning and zooming into the textures of the walls, recognising the lightswitches and heavy dining chairs I later sat at in a different flat.
My childhood home in the UK which I was desperate to leave and which I write from now. The first flat I furnished with a partner in North London with a mix of our family’s furniture, that we later vacated, taking different items of furniture with us into separate homes. They span my dad’s first trip home after a gruelling few years in the UK, my mum not in the picture yet. They span the trip home to India on the occasion of my parents’ wedding, I not in the picture yet. The head tops of my dad, my mum’s reddish brown hair, the nike cap of my partner barely visible in front of the plant that came from his grandmother’s home, the messy fly-aways of my hair, parents who are unsure of how to respond to the curls. They contain white-washed walls, white painted rented walls, beige wallpaper walls over different geographies. My partner and I used to comment on the parquet floor of the flat in the 70s block we rented. Looking at our sparsely furnished rooms, he used to say ‘this makes me feel like a couple who just arrived from Cyprus in the 70s’. We would view his mercedes from our window and feel safe. We had just arrived.