Like Dadima Like Smriti

With this project, Smriti embarks upon remembrance, which is also the meaning of her name. She ventures into this territory in an attempt to not leave unnoticed the deep imprints of those closest to her. She acknowledges that her memories are fraught with biases, gaps, fictions and fact but what she attempts to stay true to is the emotion paired with the fragments of memory and a newer understanding of her relationships. She is both a purveyor of information and storyteller and is challenged by taking the mundane & every day and unravelling & reassembling these details into visible intricacies. While sorting through her grandmother's things after her death, Smriti came across a trunk full of her grandfather's clothes that her grandmother had put away after his very sudden and early demise. This project is about loss, letting go and preserving memory. The Memory Project, in large part, is an active act of remembering her grandmother (Dadima) and her father beyond the last few months of their lives, which as she witnessed was very, very hard. She refuses to let the memory of this last struggle overpower thirty-three years of her life with them. She loves her family profusely. This project is an act of love, an act of refusal to accept sadness as the story or as the end. It demands of her an emotional will that she sometimes doubt she has but she has known that strength before and she will find it again.