Home is a multidimensional concept, and we acknowledge the presence of and need for multidisciplinary research in the field. . It raises the question of whether or not home is a place, a space, a feeling, a practice, or an active state of being in the world. While memories of home are often nostalgic and sentimental, home is not simply recalled or experienced in positive ways. Home touches our personal lives centrally.

A question arises in my mind: “Is home a place, a space, a feeling, a practice, or an active state of being in the world?” I feel it is variously described as conflated with or related to house, family, haven, self, gender, and journeying.

According to theorist Peter Somerville, “Home is not just a matter of feelings and lived experience but also of cognition and intellectual construction; people may have a sense of home even though they have no experience or memory of it. . . . We cannot know what home’really’ is outside of these ideological structures.”

The fragile human life leaves behind a certain sensitivity captive inside the concrete structure of our private space (home). We live in a so-called “concrete” life with structured objects and structured spaces binding our limitations. I feel sometimes that when our presence fades away, do our senses remain embedded in these concrete structures? Or, in the course of time, do these objects also desaturate our presence?

“Silence,” I feel, is the appropriate term in most of the cases where one needs to connect to one’s space of existence. For me, being an introvert, I cannot connect with people much with words, whether they are family or outsiders, but I feel all the essence of it through silent observation. Silence plays a vital role in communicating and even terminating a relationship. In the passage of time, walking through the memory lane, sometimes I shiver, thinking the time is grasping us and our relation with the person next to us, even the space around us, but we as individuals are silently accepting all the norms and moving away with time.

Embracing the memories and the spaces that hold the origin of my personal identity is reflected in these works. Revisiting the past through the memory lanes and reconstructing privacy through the world of uncanny imagination seems to be happening over here again. Here, I think the thoughts and the images are collaged on the same plane to form a meaningful formation.

In this series, I worked mainly with the known objects of my personal space using my home and the mud collected from within the boundary of my house. I feel the collected mud creates a relation to my land roots from the space I grew up in. Over the passage of time, how the private space is affected by social norms and how our presences are being faded away from the objects revolve around my work. A relationship without bindings, a relationship without any compulsion, a relationship without terms, a relationship of equality in minds, etc. These sentiments are important in the growing-up years of every human mind. I feel somehow we are losing this essence of life in today’s world.

In the work “A Gentle Empire over Fraternity Souls,” I used one of the most important photographs of my life. While working in this process, I found that we do not only live with certain relationships around us under one roof, but all of them constitute different layers of life. “Siblings” is the most invaluable relationship that a human mind can have. Somehow nowadays, I feel that time is grasping us, with relationships fading away from one’s mind.

While being in the process of work, I feel a virtual space is created within my work with the objects of the real space around me, and these objects carry their experience of their regular lives and how they develop intimate relations with the humans around them. These relations are developed in the “waking” state of human life.

Displacement occurs with time. This is the only thing that came to mind while doing this series of tasks. Whether it is the displacement of thought, physical displacement, molecular displacement, or emotional displacement, each of them is related to the growth of time and the space around which we live.

Jayeti Bhattacharya