Afra Tafri - My home at the intersection
How do we move forward with a legacy of violent conflict and collective trauma and what to do with the resulting dilemmas of memory?
Boundary between documentary and fiction
Abhishek Thapar, born in Moga, Punjab in the 1980s, set out with his mother, father and sister in search of the truths of the past. He revisited the house of his childhood: a house that had disappeared, a place they all thought they had forgotten and yet it continued to exist, preserved in a jar of ghostly images, amid the conflicting priorities of official histories and the personal memories of three generations. In a final attempt at closure, the family returned to the house in Moga - and moved back in. Together, they created a work of art ...
My home at the Intersection complicates reductive perceptions of Punjab's recent history and produces an imagination that goes beyond dichotomies of perpetrators and victims, outside and inside, terrorism and resistance. In the intimate setting of his performance, Thapar unfolds moments of a personal journey into a twisted past in dialogue with documents of an attempt at a ritual of ‘going back, to make sure you have forgotten the past’.