installation

 The Map of Becoming 2025

The Map of Becoming is an immersive, transnational, and interdisciplinary exploration of migration, memory, and belonging. Through installation, sculpture, painting, projection, and participatory elements, the work is a meditation on the interconnectedness of life, structured around layered metaphors.

The cube, made from a local repurposed 1940s wardrobe, embodies containment, memory, and transformation. Tree roots anchor ancestry and cultural traces, while the tree canopy reflects growth, adaptation, and hybrid belonging.

Arrivals & Departures boards mirror the constant flux of migration, using words and imagery to foreground the ethical, relational, and empathetic dimensions of migration. A triptych of cockatoo, faun, and owl evokes mobility, hybridity, and ancestral memory.

Peepholes, performative elements, sound, and mirrored fragments create intimate, layered, and participatory perspectives.

Together, these elements form a living ecosystem reflecting the fragile, shifting, and relational nature of identity, home, and belonging.

Dancer with Suitcase Video: Migration and memory as lived, embodied and relational experience, emphasising co-construction of identity and belonging. Performer @mim_j2004

The work investigates how movement, displacement, and alienation shape hybrid selves, carrying the emotional, cultural, and material traces that are continually transported, lost, and reimagined through migration. Migration is framed not merely as survival but as a transformative, universal act of becoming, shaped by interdependence, memory, and continual negotiation. The work examines how societal labelling, othering, and acculturation can silence and alienate migrants, questioning who holds the power to define identity and belonging: dominant cultures, migration systems, or migrants themselves.

Arrivals & Departures projections and text mirror migration’s constant flux and the fluidity of belonging.
Audiohole and lullaby: a dual-language song composed for the installation, weaving sound, language, and narrative to evoke movement, loss, comfort, and belonging
The triptych of cockatoo, faun, and owl evokes migration, hybridity, and ancestral memory. The cockatoo represents mobility and voice, the faun reflects liminality, othering, and mythic belonging, and the owl carries memory, wisdom, and connection to ancestral knowledge.
Peephole Peepholes, color, light, and paintings of mythic hybrid figures evoke transformation, memory, journey, and enduranceemory, journey, and endurance.
Tree Canopy: Expands beyond boundaries of growth & belonging, reflecting adaptation and hybrid identity, with a suitcase carrying the carrying the personal marks and traces of home and migration
Diorama of Owl & Female Form: Merges ancestral wisdom with lived bodily experience, creating a hybrid meditation on memory and guidance.
Peepholes create intimate, participatory experiences, inviting viewers to engage with migration and memory. Offering fragmented perspectives, they reflect the partial and shifting nature of home, identity, and belonging, together forming a layered, relational ecosystem.
Shadows suggest the interplay of light and dark, presence and absence, the intangible traces of identity and belonging.
Tree Roots (Memory & Ancestry): Ground identity, carrying cultural heritage and ancestral traces, anchoring memory even as it stretches, intertwines, and seeks new nourishment.

Repurposed locally manufcatured 1940s wardrobe, local tree roots and canopy elements, projections, paint, mixed-media triptychs, diorama components, peepholes, mirrored fragments, audio recordings, video, dancer props (suitcase), projection, text displays and environmental elements (shadows, spatial interactions).. 4 x 4.5 metres.