Paati’s Bedroom

A pop-up, multi-use grief space built to embody the bedroom of Néa’s Paati, a deceased Tamil woman who resided in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. This curated bedroom will adapt to outdoor, indoor, and transitional spaces across the world. 

The focal point of the room is a simple hand-built wooden bed frame low to the ground. The bed will be covered with a mosquito net. Surrounding the bed will be objects such as old typewriter recipes, photographs, skin oil and powder, and small tins for pottu, the symbol of a married Tamil woman. The physical objects will give room for other stories of grief to unfold, thus opening windows towards liberation. 

As migrants and displaced people, we cannot engage with our ancestral and personal grief amidst capitalism and systemic oppression. By curating this multi-use grief space, we aim to provide a transformative and held grieving space which elongates time and builds cross-movement solidarity, giving us the tools to move through grief and focus on healing. 

Built for and by migrants and displaced people, this interactive installation will explore the interwoven perspectives of past, present and imagined Tamil people. It will hold art, words, voices, smells, sounds, stories, and objects from histories of war and violence, bringing Arab and Tamil artists into a collaboration for their mutual struggles for liberation, healing, and homeland.

Paati’s Bedroom was initially developed as a project pitch in collaboration with Healing Justice London and Artsadmin.

Full pitch in our ARCHIVE

This is grief work.

This is grieving into love work.

This is grieving into peace work.

This is grieving into action work.

This grieving into rage.

This is grieving into fire.

This grieving into home.

This is grieving into homeland.

This is grief work.

This is grieving into warm nights of safety.

This is grieving into our collective grief.

This is grieving into this moment here.

This is grieving into remembering.

This is grief work.

Hope is a discipline.

Hope is our patience and our struggle.

Hope is a lighting a candle for breath and bread and silence.

Hope is a discipline.