After moving to Canada in 2018, Calgary-based artist Santosh Korthiwada found that his memories of a lifetime in India were vibrantly present and tragically fading. Sometimes, he would walk around a corner with an absolute certainty that the street vendor from his childhood would be there. Smells and sounds sparked moments of overlap – when his memories of the past would push themselves into his experience of the present. But as the distance between his life in India and his life in Canada grows, the memories are fading, with these moments of vivid remembrance happening less and less.
Through digital collage, Korthiwada is trying to preserve his memories. Each piece in Inseparable Fragments makes visible the truly individual, intangible sensations of remembering for others.
Between 1995 and 2014, Korthiwada spent a lot of time travelling around India, being welcomed by strangers into the most beautiful and unexpected places. These journeys resulted in tens of thousands of photographs. Hundreds of these individual images are digitally stitched together, each fragment chosen because it holds a piece of memory – a sound, a smell, a place or a person. They all come together to recreate a moment from the past.
With time, we will all experience the sting of loss when we can no longer remember a loved one’s voice or the name of our childhood school. For Korthiwada, this fear of loss is now linked with hope – that his created space will spark everyone’s memories of home.
