There Is No Other Home

There Is No Other Home is a multidisciplinary project rooted in lived experiences, exploring the complex relationship between body, memory, and selfhood. Questioning what it means when the body, the supposed “home”, becomes a distant echo.

In July 2019, I was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a rare neurological condition that quickly brings you to complete paralysis. Eventually, I regained movement, but I did not recover the same way inside. My body healed, yet I remained estranged from it. This disconnection between my body and soul continues to shape how I live.

In There Is No Other Home I explore Still-Life, text, sculpture and mixed media experiments to address the Non-Linearity of Healing, and depict healing as a loop. Using staged photography I reflect on how trauma rewires both memory and body. The images move between absence and presence, rupture and repair, exploring the tension of detachment and reattachment to one’s own body.

There Is No Other Home emerges from the space between chaos and understanding. My body often feels like it carries its own memory. My hands loose grip, I stumble more often, and I freeze at things others take for granted, like driving. I return to fragments of memory, my mother’s CT scan when she was carrying me and my twin sister, a childhood photograph, not as evidence of illness but as traces of fragility, endurance, and survival.

Working with hands became central. Sensations of tingling in my fingers was the first sign of my illness, so I sculpted and cast hands as a way to confront the absence of movement.

During hand casting, when my fingers would not move, something happened. I felt trapped again, transported into the same helplessness of the hospital bed. My body went into shock, trembling, my fingers freezing, my breath catching, and a weight pressing down that I could neither name nor overcome. It was my body’s embodied memory in action. My body was reliving trauma beyond conscious thought, what neuroscience calls Somatic Flashback. This experience affirmed the very questions that started this project: How does the body hold memory? How does trauma fragment the self? What does healing mean when your body feels half, disconnected, or estranged from you?

In this process of self-discovery, camera became both my weapon and my shield. I reimagine Photography as a tactile language of healing, a space to witness, question, and accept the scattered parts of self. There Is No Other Home reveals the paradox of art as both a form of control and a confrontation with chaos, where making becomes a physical encounter with trauma and healing. The hands I sculpted became more than metaphors, they turned into a tangible form of trauma, making visible what is normally invisible to the eyes.

There Is No Other Home is an ongoing project that continues to evolve, exploring the dialogue between conscious memory and embodied memory through experimentation with photography, sculpture, text, and scanning. My practice remains open to new forms and materials as I deepen my inquiry into trauma, body, and healing, while questioning the boundaries of visual and tactile storytelling.