Why does home doesn’t feel like home?
What is home? Is it where my roots are? I was born in Manang to a Manangi family. It’s where my siblings, my parents, and their parents grew up. It’s where I learned what it means to feel safe and belong. Manang holds all the memories of my childhood. Manang is home.
But more recently, whenever I have visited my family in Manang, I have felt a sense of unease, as if my home Manang no longer sees me as one of its own. Do people think I am an alien from another world? Have I become a mere guest in their eyes who occasionally visits, but eventually returns back to life in Kathmandu?
My brother who lives in Manang thinks it is a good idea to tear down our ancestral house and build a snooker house in its place. Where I see Appa’s legacy that deserves to be preserved, my brother sees economic opportunities worth pursuing. Our ideas of home have diverged, and increasingly, I feel like an outsider that no longer understands the sentiments or aspirations of my own people.
As global migration trends are changing, more youth are returning to Manang, lured by its prospects as a tourist destination. I also find myself dreaming of going back home, to reconnect, to contribute, to belong, but something holds me back. With a camera in hand, I am trying to rediscover my relationship with this place, with my past, navigating ideas of home and belonging tied to Manang. Maybe home for me is no longer just a place, but this search for identity, memory and connection.
The idea of progress brings with it conflicting impulses, promises of better futures shadowed by debilitating losses. These often invisible, unacknowledged, and unaccounted-for losses form the bedrock of the stories in this exhibition. For many of the storytellers, personal histories intersect with larger histories of development, nation building, political repression, and ecological destruction.
From Buipa to Manang, Jhumlawang to Jharuwarasi, Ramhiti to Kerabari, Thankot to Piskar, the sites of these stories span hills, forests, fields, and settlements. Land is a common refrain in these stories. It surfaces as memory, as belonging, as inheritance, as loss, as unhealed wounds. It appears in stories of extraction, speculation, waiting, and endurance.
How do we take stock of all the “collateral damage” that progress keeps depositing on our doorsteps, again and again? How do we unravel its fraudulence? How do we record what we have lost?
Storytelling becomes an act of remembering. Remembering becomes an act of resistance.Presented as part of the second iteration of the photo.circle Fellowship Program, a six-month-long initiative designed to support our growing community of visual storytellers, this exhibition brings together eight practitioners examining what “bikas” and” samriddhi” mean for Nepali society. It invites deeper reflection on the questions, challenges, and contradictions around the modes of “development” and notions of “progress” being promoted in Nepal today.