Pas comme à la maison

The search for community is often a driving force within diasporic dynamics, an instinctive tool for simultaneously recreating the familiar and sharing what binds us together. This quest informs Lojithan Ram’s residency project, which explores the Tamil diaspora in Paris. By regularly meeting with family relatives residing in La Courneuve, his research begins through an intimate lens and focuses on gatherings as catalysts for connection. Walking the streets of the La Chapelle neighbourhood, Ram also adopts an external gaze at the community’s reconstruction. What do shopfronts, political effigies now banned in Sri Lanka, and bilingual prayer posters tell us about it? Can what is no longer there be recreated here? “It doesn’t feel like home, does it?” Through such testimonies by residents in France of Tamil origin, recorded by the Sri Lankan artist, we are thus reminded of the remaining gap between the two. 

For this research spanning two geographical contexts, Ram resorts to a single methodology: collecting the spontaneous, the immediate, and the unfiltered. Voices captured in supermarkets, street photographs, family portraits, smartphone lives, flyers, and receipts all constitute an archive of this journey. The artist presents this collection in zines, inviting visitors to leaf through its pockets. At the same time, through a deep dive into the archives of the Museum der Kulturen Basel, the artist has been granted access to anthropological photographic portraits of Tamils in Sri Lanka. He reproduces the negatives using cyanotype printing and invites members of his newly formed Parisian community to sew excerpts from their testimonies onto them. As such, Ram not only superimposes an act of care onto a colonial extractive gaze but also opens a dialogue between generations and geographies, allowing for one community to come together.

Text:  Alexia Pierre, Curator, France