Mémoire Temporelle operates from a position of distance between a life lived in London and an inherited relationship to India shaped through memory and imagination.
Developed over several journeys to Mumbai, the work constructs fragments of a parallel life. Encounters move between chance and staging; figures shift between presence and projection.
The images do not document place, but propose a speculative biography.
Working between observation and fiction, the photograph is treated as a site of negotiation rather than evidence. Distance, framing, and obstruction are used to foreground the conditions of looking.
The sequence unfolds through association rather than narrative, with recurring motifs linking images across time.
The work extends an ongoing investigation into identity under conditions of displacement—where the self is not recovered, but imagined.
"What is it to imagine another life ? What are Memories ? Some stay others fade some we imagine and they become another life. I chose to relive another life in Bombay, it was always Bombay to me before it became Mumbai. Jamnadas, my grandfather ran away from Gujerat at 14 years old to live on the streets of Bombay for a few years before embarking to Rangoon, Karachi, Jamnagar and Junagadh and then to Nairobi and finally to London. What if he had stayed in Bombay it is that I imagined. " Kalpesh Lathigra