LOSING YOUR MOTHER
Short experimental documentary
Status: In progress
Medium: HD Digital video, colour, B&W & sound. Digital file conversion from 8mm, DV tape; archival footage.
Country: UK, India
Year: In 2022 - present
Losing Your Mother stages an encounter with a collection of found objects: a set of colonial postcards and a collection of photographs and films drawn from my family archive. I draw on my travels across India to my grandfather’s hometown of Amreili, which he left shortly after partition, reflecting on the legacies, technologies and history of colonial image making. In the film, the speaker’s attempts to align her fragmented memories/postmemories of India with the reality of the spaces she encounters are constantly frustrated. There is a discrepancy between the real, encountered space and the space of memory.
Losing Your Mother takes it’s title from Saidiya Hartman’s 2006 text ‘Lose Your Mother’, in which she traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana.
Losing Your Mother takes it’s title from Saidiya Hartman’s 2006 text ‘Lose Your Mother’, in which she traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana.
The partition of India in 1947 into two new nations, India and Pakistan, is the central trauma arond which the events of the film precariously hang. The event, which resulted in the mass displacement of people across borders, is central to the speaker’s family history. However, in the film this context is a black hole, referenced only indirectly. The film uses superimposition of images––a modern reinterpretation of illusion-building strategies like double exposure used in the production of colonial postcards––to draw attention to the illusion of photography's indexicality, and the seemingly insurmountable problematics of the decolonial project.
Stills from ‘Losing Your Mother’, 2023.