as we lose sight of the line across the sky

To leave is to replace a part of life; to return is to realise that neither the place nor the self remains the same. This project traces a collective journey of remigration through individuals within my circle, shaped by experiences of hope, longing, liminality, and alienation. It asks why they leave a place once aspired to or why they return to a place once desired to escape, reflecting the contrast between imagined destinations and lived experiences. Their journey is marked by a heightened vulnerability and uncertainty as they build lives elsewhere, only to leave them behind and return to India, where reintegration carries another set of challenges.

Migration unfolds across both personal and political levels, where the border between choice and compulsion is blurred by systems larger than the individual. Based on interviews and conversations, the photographs reflect my impressions of their journey. The portrait becomes a performative and transformative act that reveals the idea of home and identity as temporal and contingent. Domestic objects act as carriers of memory that defy the monolithic migration narratives of segregation, foregrounding resilience and belonging beyond frameworks of assimilation or productivity.

The project also seeks to highlight the constructed and often arbitrary nature of nationality, borders, and citizenship, focusing on long histories of migration and cultural anthropology. Existing in a state of transit, the work moves between push and pull, outside and inside, memory and change, bearing witness to lives reshaped by the possibility of return and the ongoing search for belonging.