Feelings of Exiles reflects on histories of oppression and the sensitivities they continue to shape. The works arise from wounded collective memories, while simultaneously proposing alternative realities that challenge how we see and inhabit the world.

Wooden panels, evoking dwellings floating on water, become a potent symbol of the nomadic proletariat — communities compelled to move by necessity, survival, and the search for belonging. Suspended and assembled into a rudimentary shelter, they frame small hanging religious sculptures at the core of the structure. From beneath the slanted platform, the sound of the ocean resonates in a continuous loop, enveloping the installation and inviting an experience at once physical and spiritual.

The work meditates on fragility, culture, spirituality, and the notion of “home,” while probing our relationship to territory. The forms operate as metaphors for the Atlantic passage, for migrations and exchanges — both forced and chosen — across continents.

By tracing a line from the precarious architectures of enslaved people on U.S. plantations to the conditions of contemporary human trafficking, the installation forges a historical continuum between past and present. It makes visible the enduring experiences of exile, marginality, and displacement. Yet rather than illustrating suffering alone, it foregrounds the resilience, faith, and creativity that emerge from it.

Equally, the work reflects on the occupation of space — physical, symbolic, and political. It dwells in the thresholds between inside and outside, between intimacy and publicness, between shelter and exposure. The floating structures become liminal sites where presence, visibility, and memory are negotiated.

They also resonate with the urgencies of our present: climate crisis, mass migration, and the redefinition of citizenship and autonomy. Within the installation, these fragile architectures become symbolic stages upon which the struggles for emancipation and human dignity are continually replayed.

With this project, I seek to move beyond the confines of the nation-state, revealing the richness that emerges from belonging to multiple cultures. Feelings of Exiles celebrates multiplicity, movement, and shared memory as the foundations of an identity in perpetual transformation.

First presented at the Big Art Fair 2025 in Amsterdam, the series functions as an “imaginary archaeology” of displacement. It offers viewers a contemplative space to consider what it means to inhabit the world today — poised in a precarious balance between memory, uprooting, and reconstruction.