Mapping Obscura: Locating the Space and Non-Space of Memory and Home through the Photograph.

What does it mean to inhabit? Our many selves find dimensionality through time and in place. This is complicated through the event of mass migration and trauma. One is continuously mapped through a locating of interiority. Within this essay, Nayar traces the birth and evolution of place as interior, and the genesis of her hybrid, constructed photographic process. Through the lens of India's 1947 Partition, a trajectory of trauma and the ways in which memory functions over time is traced and translated through a family's resettlement home in New Delhi. Built by her maternal grandfather, a refugee and psychiatrist from East Bengal, this locus in Nayar's memory sheds light on how one may understand the many intersections of belonging and place. Home is found in habitation, that of desire and the awakening of the Mother. In this way, attachment theory, Winnicott's transitional object, and the uncanny are touchstones for an internal mapping of psychic space. Through this framework, one understands what it means to embody through time and what is, through the process, left behind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]