Will you come to Rome with me? is a project exploring memories of my mother through family portraits and places in film and slides, poems, and texts from my journal. The individual and collective memories are weaved together like sarees that my mother used to drape in.

I am looking back on memories that were dear to my mother and those that I grew up with. Memories that stay in my dreams and consciousness, and those that almost fade. My mother has lived so many different lives, inhabited so many different places, as in many photos, I find it hard to really see her. Every few years she seemed to shed her old self and is born anew. Though she played many roles in different times and places, the essence of her seemed to have never changed.

I look for and try to reconstruct the passage of time that belonged to us, sense of her and the invisible bond connecting me with my mother. It is the culmination of years of gathering, digesting, and distilling experience, and fleeting moments with faces, her sarees, places, objects, and my inner voice. It is a dialogue of a trip to Rome together; a journey that we never took. But it is a story of her presence in me and me in her.

Wherever I can be, she can be in me and I in her.

I had been journaling on this project since 2009 – bits and pieces here and there, and gathering photos as well. The workshop by Yumi Goto (Reminder Photography Stronghold) inspired me to face this very personal journey of mine and make possible the artist book form.