My father told us to get nice shoes for the wedding. I get red high heels, my sister cream high heels.
Underneath the Sari no one can see our shoes.
Everyone else wear flat shoes. We struggle to walk in 8 meters of fabric and high heels.
the folds of the fabric fall differently each time is work in progress and is a starting point of a larger body of work on differences within my own family. We are dispersed all over the world, and closely related family members (such as me and my cousins) are finding it difficult to understand each other in different places of the world, speaking different languages. My father moved from Sri-Lanka over 40 years ago. Since then one of his brother’s moved to New York and another one to Paris. I started my research in Paris with my uncle there and his family. Contrary to my father who embraced Sweden to the extent that he almost lost his mother tongue, my uncle in Paris holds on to traditions, food and language from Sri-Lanka. He lives with his family in Clichy-sous-Bois, a rough suburb outside of Paris, and left Sri-Lanka during the war as a refugee.
I did not meet any of my Tamil relatives until I was a teenager, and I have always had difficulties understanding them and to be understood by them. In Paris I have attempted to understand what it is that makes me and my relatives seem so different from each other. Is it just differences in cultural behaviour and manners or is it that we have inherited preconceived ideas about each other from our different environments? Are my thoughts my own or are they from my society? By a body of work which will grow with both text and images I hope to show the complexities and difficulties of difference.
