“You never had those yellow slippers,” my mother says, so firmly that my memory begins to feel betrayed. Yet I still see them: yellow soles, black and yellow braided straps, left behind the first time we moved house. I was four. That visual memory has stayed with me ever since.

In 2024, my photographic negatives archive returned to me in Berlin. I had made them in Myanmar before fleeing after the 2021 military coup.It had been too dangerous to carry them with me, so I left them behind at my friends’ house. When I finally manage to bring it back, the negatives were scratched, stained, and marked by dust, humidity, handling, and time. What survives does not come back unchanged.

Alongside these archive images, I work with new analogue photographs made in Berlin. These years I spend more time in the kitchen now. I make pickles. I ferment food. I brew kombucha. Salt, brine, rice water, turmeric, time. Something changes because I touched it. Developing images works like that too, until it doesn’t.I develop them with liquids from the kitchen: salt water, pickle brine, fermented water, wine. Colours drift. Emulsions wrinkle. Parts of the image fall away. I guide it as it slips away.

Making pickles and developing images in the kitchen gives me a small room of control. Outside it, my life is less certain.In Germany, the visibility of neo-Nazi and far-right movements has taught my body to react before I do. When I see a group of young men with clean crew cuts, I avoid them. I do not wait to find out if the fear is justified. What I escaped has followed me here.

I still do not know if the yellow slippers were ever mine.