'Defining Relative Space' is Jayeti Battacharya's contribution to the Group Visual Arts Project 'RACONTEURS', currently taking place at the A.M. Studio in Kolkata, India. She addresses here the concept of 'home', charged with connotations and references to both physical and psychological realities.

‘Home’ is a multidimensional concept and acknowledges for the presence and need for multidisciplinary research in the field. It raises the question whether home is a place, a set of feelings, practices, or an active state of ‘being in the world’.

While memories of home are often nostalgic and sentimental, home is not simply recalled or experienced in positive ways. Home centrally touches our personal life.

In this set of works about ‘home’, structure, space, time, object, boundaries, and restrictions play a vital role. Fragmentation of known space, fragmentation of known objects, and how, with time, these objects fade away from us, play a vital role in my work.

Sometimes the questions arises to my mind, ‘Is home a place, a space, feelings, practices, or an active state of being in the world?’ It is variously described as conflated with or related to house, family, heaven, self, gender, and journey.

The fragile human life leaves certain sensitivities behind, captive inside the concrete structure of our private space. We live in the so-called concrete life with structured objects and structured spaces binding our limitations. I feel sometimes that when our presence fades away, our senses remain embedded in these concrete structures, and in the process of time these objects also desaturate our presence.

Embracing the memories and spaces that hold the origin of my personal identity is reflected in these works. Revisiting the past through memory lane and reconstructing the privacy through the world of uncanny imaginations seems to be happening over here again. The thoughts and images are collaged in the same plane to form a meaningful shape of it.

While being in the process of work, I feel like a virtuous space is created within my work with the objects of real space around me, and these objects carry the experience of their regular life, and how they develop an intimate relationship with humans around them.

In this series I worked mainly with the known objects of my personal space, using my home and the mud collected from within the boundary of my house. The mud creates a relation of my land roots to the space where I grew up. My work revolves around the questions of how the private space is affected by social norms and how our presence fades away from these objects over the passage of time.

A relation without bindings, a relation without any compulsion, a relation of no charms, a relation of equality plays a vital role here. These sentiments are important in the growing up years of every human mind. I feel somehow we are losing the essence of life in today’s work. Displacement does occur with time. It is the thought that kept coming to my mind while doing this series of work. Whether it is displacement of thought, physical displacement or emotional displacement, each of it is related to the growth of time and space around which we live.