Final Year Project

Project Title

ROOM TO ROAM: Negotiating Becoming

Description

Roaming from room to room the wayfarer forgets her way home, what is mine, what is yours, the wayfarer forgets to whom what belongs. Nagari nagari phira musafir ghar ka rasta bhul gaya, kya hai mera, kya hai tera, apna paraya bhul gaya. — Miraji To whoever comes across this, The contents of this storage box are tokens from meditation on our memories, souvenirs from conversations I had with some queer friends in Karachi. They are traces of our negotiations in becoming, in and through time, of feelings felt, of lives lived, of physical and mental rooms that shift; those we are born in, those we choose, those we leave, and those that we eventually return to. When I began this project, I was thinking about memory, and how it shifts with time sometimes as we do, roaming through various rooms in the world, negotiating our existences and becoming. We seem to hold onto different things at different times, across our lives, and in our days and nights, what we desire shifts. As post-colonial urban queers, there is no one way of negotiation, assertion, or expression of the self we follow. Time and experience/associations queer our relations to rooms, and we queer our rooms in return, with/in time, experiences and associations. Our truths are often contradictory, translucent, fragmented and segmented in space and time. We sometimes forget some of our truths to find some others, and we become with/in these negotiations, roaming through rooms of being differently, and returning to what we do. This is an archive of present and past and future ephemera. This box holds some of our stories and some of our secrets, in traces that we chose to leave for you to find. Welcome to our mehfil of memories. As you engage with this work, I hope you extend this framework of rooms to your own experiences, exploring the rooms you’ve existed in, and the rooms that have emerged in your own negotiations in becoming; physically and mentally, emotionally and relationally, and how they’ve shifted with time. Sincerely, Honeya Jamal