There was a bay below and mountains above.

My work talks about borders, about crossing them, and about exchange. It initiates a dialogue between the cultures, going back and forth, digging in memory, and setting new priorities. Lost and found, erasing and revealing, disorientation and relocation, exile and belonging. Between homesick and homeseek!

 Being the daughter of a land reform officer, I grew up seeing land records, survey maps, maps recording the names of sharecroppers (bargadars), records for acquiring homestead lands for the weaker classes, maps of no man’s land, urban lands, or documents of land reform issues. One could say: I learned of the importance of land and soil in my early  childhood. Due to my father’s job, our family moved from one place to another, and in more recent years, living with such instability in temporary situations and homes helped me better understand the global issues of diaspora, migration, exile, and subsequent questions around identity.

 During my last residency in Switzerland, I developed white-on-white drawings on paper with a “scratched technique” of text fragments in different languages “found” during my conversations with migrants and refugees. Language, or the loss of it as a result of migration, plays a crucial part in my research. My work is firmly based on my investigations, my observations, and social interaction.

 This project, ‘There was a bay below and mountains above’, is an extension of my previous project, ‘Zwischen’. After coming back to my homeland of Kolkata, I started working on my ongoing research. Recently, while I was reading some short stories from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, one particular text touched and twisted me in a very different dimension. How Miranda studied the borders of Bengal to imagine the birthplace of his lover through the map reminded me of the stories and memories of the migrants I met last year. And even after coming back to my homeland, I naturally started engaging myself with the migrants from different parts of India and Bangladesh who live here.

 I prefer to work with the inscriptions of visual text. The famous phrase of Freud is “Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent person.” All the words inscribed with small scratches on the paper are an attempt to challenge the ability to keep memories through inkless drawings. The formal and conceptual ideas of emotions within the framework of personal reference comprise the language of my work. Drawings are, for me, like the transformation of abstract diagrams of people’s emotions. I feel emotions are very powerful, and they are white, abstract, sometimes representational, fragile, and also formative, chaotic, and serene.

Ishita Chakraborty