Between Shores

Between Shores is a photographic exploration of memory, migration and belonging, rooted in my return to Suriname, thirty-eight years after leaving my childhood home.

Returning to the waters near my homeland, I encountered a profound sense of recognition. The landscape, light, water and atmosphere evoked a feeling of belonging that was difficult to reconcile with how indistinct many of my childhood memories had become. I knew where I had lived and where I came from, yet the experience of being there had become increasingly difficult to retrieve.

The photographs are therefore not attempts to reconstruct my childhood or to document a place as it once was. Instead, they explore the space between what I know and what I remember, between fact and feeling. I photograph what is present while searching for something that is no longer visible: an emotional trace of a place that has remained within me even as specific memories have faded.

In Between Shores, memory is approached not as a precise recollection, but as a sensation—a quality of light, the movement of air, the density of a landscape, or a moment of recognition without certainty. The work moves between the personal and the universal, reflecting on the experience of migration: the enrichment that comes from living between worlds, alongside the quiet loss of roots in the place left behind.

Ultimately, Between Shores asks what it means to return to a place we once called home, and whether belonging can survive when memory itself has become incomplete.

August 2026