Practicing the Continuity of Home

Carolina Sanchez, 2024
Dina Varpahovsky
Jade Harris

Disorientation and re-imagination in a "globalised" world

Christine Toelle
Ella Porteous
Nirmiti Vinay Sawant
Rbeeza Mobeen

Roots/Routes of Home

Alizée Zandile
Ben Oliver
Jhani Randhawa
Sarah Rakotonirina (Saz)
Sarah Vogelsanger
Scarlett Haig
2024 Exhibition

#3 —Roots/Routes of Home


The works in this section explore the dual concepts of roots and routes, examining how diasporic communities forge connections to their homelands while navigating new environments. Sarah Vogelsanger's poem poster captures the emotional landscape of second-generation migrants, Ben Oliver's photographs highlight the role of money transfer operators in maintaining familial ties across borders, Jhani Randhawa's video essay reflects on inherited memories within the Kenyan-Punjabi Sikh diaspora, Saz/Sarah's video collage intertwines family images with Malagasy heritage, and Scarlett Haig's installation with photographs suspended on a ring symbolises the dynamic process of home-making in the diaspora.






Alizée Zandile, 2024
Single Audio Channel, 04’40’’ 

   This song is meant to evoke the emotional and psychological difficulties that arise with immigrating to a land of a different culture, of a different tongue, and of a different environment than those one is native to. The emphasis on the natural imagery is meant to emphasise the imbedded connection with the ‘homeland’ whilst also nodding to the importance of the spiritual connection with the land of one’s ancestors, which is crucial to many cultures worldwide. Whilst this third-person recollection may come from personal observation as a second generation immigrant, the goal was to shed a universal light on both the struggles and successes which take place within the diasporic experience, thus emphasising the rocking balance between belonging and displacement. Ultimately, the aim was to validate the hurdles and strains of the journey all whilst spotlighting a more positive outlook on the former.

  • Ben Oliver, 2024
    • 16 Photographs

   Photographs taken in South London, spanning Lewisham High Street to Forest Hill via Catford Broadway and the South Circular. Lewisham's diaspora communities utilise numerous international money transfer operators (MTOs), serving migrant families. The intention of this project was to adapt my positionality via the lens. If the act of diasporic ‘homing’ - or a ‘homing desire’ - can be seen as a substitute for homeland or kinship, then these MTO logos and advertisements - encouraging affordable and easy remittance - are a form of ‘homing beacon’, one that draws the eye amongst the variety of other fluorescent totems that cluster along the edges of broadways and high roads. The kinship ties that are actuated and sustained by the balanced reciprocity of money transfer create a tether between migrant and homeland, which contributes to the construction and negotiation of familial bonds across borders, positing remittance as an alternative expression of ‘home’.








Jhani Randhawa
—Micro Video Essay, 7’ 58’’ 

   “Along the Grain: Presence-ing Diasporic-Settler Masculinized Memory” is an auto-ethnographic video-poem taking inspiration from Ann Laura Stoler’s treatise on the colonial archive’s unstable biography, Along the Archival Grain (2009), to consider regimes of unintelligibility and sentiment in perpetuating carceral masculinities. The video surfaces where nineteenth-century colonized-settler masculinity was co-constructed through leisure (and its imaging)—specifically the game of field hockey—in the context of mass incarceration of Africans in East Africa before Kenyan Independence. By juxtaposing and overlaying recorded reflections with archival colonial military propaganda footage staged in Socotra Island (Yemen) and East Africa (Kenya), footage of the artists’ research in the British National Archives (Richmond, England), archival war diaries, and family photographs, the piece traces “masculinized” inherited memory of the Kenyan-Punjabi Sikh diaspora to ask: Is an archival appraisal of a Sikh diaspora who serviced a colonial police state and British nationalism broadly enough to service abolitionary memory praxis?


  • Sarah Rakotonirina (Saz)
  • —Single-Channel Video, 3’ 25’’

  • This short film is a collage of images of my family that I saw for the first time when visiting my family in Madagascar, alongside cultural products that punctuated my childhood, and found archival footage that feels familiar to my experience and, indeed, my idea of Madagascar. It is the product of musings on diasporic consciousness and how, for me, it is inflected by otherness, performance, authenticity, dislocation and home, and how these expansive concepts have shaped my individual and relational self. This video piece offers auto-biographical imaginations of self and identity formulation and their entanglements with diaspora and non-physical return.
  • Sarah Vogelsanger
  • —Poem in watercolour, 42 x 59.4 cm


  • The poem describes the unstable emotions of second-generation migrants and their relations to diasporic objects. Building on three interviews, it aims to capture the complex dynamic of “feeling at home” in multiple places and their ability to navigate in diverse cultural contexts. Including the diasporic objects, a special bridge between the country of origin and the country of birth is built. The objects act as a memory of the home country and create a feeling of belonging, but also as a reminder of displacement. It is a confrontation with the outside world and challenges their presence, which is repeated in the poem and finally directed to the reader to: why are you here today?


  • Scarlett Haig, 2024
    —Installation with Ring and Photographs

   In engaging with the plants that members of diasporic communities grow, I was offered some cuttings of plants for me to grow myself. Inspired by this interaction, I took the photographs of the plants growing in these gardens, and took 'cuttings'. I uprooted these cuttings, choosing not to re-plant them onto a fixed page, but suspended them on wire, enabling them to move and interact with each other and their surroundings. I felt this spoke to the process of home-making in the diaspora, in which it is possible to develop roots, and to build homes in the diaspora, while maintaining a loving reference to a place of origin in the choice of plants grown. Home-making in the diaspora can be productive and enjoyable. Roots may form and flowers may bloom.