Roots

Roots is a self-portrait series where home becomes an archipelago of memory fragments—photo, object, model, trace. Embedded images and repetition show loss turning into a portable inner map.

Roots is a self-portrait series exploring how home and belonging persist after early displacement, when the homeland is no longer a single place but an archipelago: a chain of separated “islands” made of images, gestures, and fragments of memory. These pieces do not form one continuous geography, yet they remain connected through routes that must be crossed and redrawn over time.

Grounded in a personally lived experience, the work treats departure not as a closed chapter but as an active present. Questions such as Who am I? Where is home? Where do I belong? return unexpectedly, like tides. Across the series, home undergoes a metamorphosis: from a physical location it becomes a photograph, then an object, a model, an inner image—ultimately a portable structure that can be held in the hands, yet cannot be re-entered in its original form.

Visually, Roots is built as a system of passages between layers of reality: an image appears within another image; a photograph becomes a thing; the thing turns into a house model; the model becomes a new trace. This embedded logic creates an archipelagic structure: each photograph operates as an “island,” while repetition and shifts in scale act as crossings—bridges, ferries, and currents—between them. Memory is not presented as linear narrative, but as a network of returns, ruptures, and temporary connections.

Working with self-portraiture and simple domestic objects, I turn the interior into a laboratory where home is not represented as a stable point, but continually reconstructed from what is available. In this sense, archipelago is not only a metaphor of fragmentation, but also a model of survival: a way of living through breaks while still forming new relations between what was lost and what continues.

Roots proposes home as a dynamic constellation of islands—an inner map that keeps shifting, yet remains a site of encounter with the self.