I Have Forgotten the Shape of Water

my project reflects migration as a fragile state between belonging and disappearance, a journey through absence, memory, and love for a homeland that still lives within me, even from afar.

On a hot summer day in 2023, I looked back and saw only dead ends. In love, in work, in dreams. Broken and lost, I began walking toward the edge of loss and that’s where my journey began.“I Have Forgotten the Shape of Water” explores migration as a continuous state of exile. not a single event, but an ongoing condition of being suspended between belonging and disappearance. Through photography, I reconstruct the fragile process of rebuilding identity after displacement. Each image becomes a quiet testimony to absence, memory, and endurance.

My homeland , Iran , has long been trapped in internal repression and external isolation. Poverty, censorship, and the erosion of hope have driven millions away. I now live in London, yet I have not seen my family or walked my country’s streets for two years. When my grandmother passed away, and when new members of my family were born, I was absent watching life unfold from afar. Or even when war erupted in my country, I was not there , not beside my family and friends.

Like many others, I fear that traveling back might mean never returning to my new home.Beyond that, I am still not strong enough to face my country again. A place I once loved so deeply that leaving it broke something inside me. And there is no real certainty that, for reasons I may never understand,I would even be allowed to leave again.

For many of us, migration is no longer about tickets, airports, or planes. It is an unending negotiation between safety and belonging, between memory and the impossibility of return.

In today’s world, immigration grows harder each day , the walls higher, the distances colder. In this global condition, I often feel as if I am nowhere truly wanted , not fully of the place I left, and not entirely of the place I live in.“I Have Forgotten the Shape of Water” gives visual form to this in-betweenness: a world built from loss, longing, and the fragile hope of rebuilding amid displacement.