Tracing Belonging – Embodied Archives

GOA/VIE/2025/8:04min work in progress

In the short film „Tracing Belonging – Embodied Archives“, Sunanda Mesquita dives into transdisciplinary explorations while overlapping, combining, merging drawings, collages and dias from the family archives via a projector onto walls, plants, flowers and objects creating an altar-like installation that speaks to the ephemerality of memory, ancestral and embodied knowledge.

“Tracing Be-longing: Embodied Archives” applies methodologies of Tracing and Drawing Closer, which are deeply connected to  Mesquita’s investigations into Be-longing and Saudade – feelings of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia sometimes even to experiences that were not (yet) personally felt, longing of what is unknown or was violently removed. 

Mesquita dives into personal archives as well as oral histories to explore process oriented archival strategies in a process of remembering, dreaming, feeling back and creating anew. At the heart of this investigation lies attempts to build proximity, recognize, capture, and to reframe histories of embodied knowledge as well as familial and communal narratives.