Spaces Of Belonging

A selection of photographs of a house nestled in an Art Deco-style building in a leafy by-lane in Mumbai brings forth the vividly tactile and spatial qualities that go beyond a vacuous built environment and focuses instead on the life that inhabits the space

- Kaiwan Mehta, Samira Rathod

Kaiwan Mehta: What led you to this photographic exploration of your own house, designed a while ago?

Samira Rathod: Photographs are an extension of our real experiences, lived at some moment, and these moments then preserved in print to reminiscence that time in space. When pictures of homes are presented without people, they seem like empty carcasses; hollow and lifeless, as if the space’s only objective was to be showcased, the space itself objectified. With this photo essay, I have reversed the narrative, which whilst makes the space its subject, but not without the suggestion of life inhabiting it. Homes are a reflection of the owners’ personality, and its paraphernalia creates the backdrop for its characters and the performance of daily routine. Design enhances this performance, transforming its banality into the extraordinary of the ordinary, in some sort of a hyperbolic metaphor. Showing pictures without people is like looking at a stage set at the beginning of play, when the curtains are just being drawn up and the lights have come on, the cacophony of the audience slowly hushing down to that weighed silence of anticipation, waiting for the act to begin but instead that’s where the play ends; as if, that itself was the act!

I didn’t want the house to be merely seen as an outside act, of objects arranged for a still life painting, but instead a museum of memories; a collection of small stories, of our home and the way we have nestled into it and the way it cocoons us all — cuddled like a baby in grandma’s all encompassing cradled lap.