Recurring environment disasters in Odisha have turned the idea of home into an inferior or temporary concept. It has turned many marginal and climate-vulnerable communities at the coast of the Bay of Bengal, particularly coastal Odia farmers and Telugu-speaking Nolia community fishers into eternal climate migrants. And now they are in transit—across inter-state borders, rehabilitation colonies, vehicles or transportation, and new communication technologies e.g. mobile phones, Internet and social media.

A Fate’s Brief Memoir is an investigation to understand the nature of these transits and their various temporal registers, and document “traces” that the coastal fishers and farmers leave behind as climate migrants. Titled after Agha Shahid Ali’s poem, this series of lenticular prints set a constant back-and-forth movement from the site of the disaster to the shelter homes, rehabilitation colonies, and other inhabited temporary and migratory spaces, and prompts the viewers also to move back and forth to see the image with clarity. The work reduces the overwhelming climate migration stories (events) and turns them into an experience by bringing the before and after-image of a particular disaster on the same surface.