In this work, I use the term ‘becoming’ in its broader philosophical sense, considering change as a process, the transition from one state of ‘being’ to another. Change is an inevitable and essential part of our world. Being and Becoming focuses on the lives of different migrant workers who left their original countries to seek better living conditions inEurope. I wished to convey their human presence and reveal emotions and signs (on faces or in surroundings). With these psychological portraits, my aim was to open a perceptual space to reflect on concepts such as ‘hybrid identity’ and ‘third space’, and on the multipolar struggle embodied in living in-between cultures, languages and borders.Homi Bhabha describes the ‘third space’ as an area of ambiguity and continual negotiation between social and geographic spaces. In this unstable ‘socio-and-geo-cultural’ context, emigrants are Beings in movement, caught up in an ambivalent dual space that can produce a split in their identity. In the Being and Becoming photobook, the Portuguese geographerÁlvaro Domingues writes ‘this is the permanent condition of identity building. As in a complex cyber environment, identity manifests itself in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, between reality and expectation, the experienced and the relation with other, in local and universal places.’I explore these complex intersections through the medium of photography, to confront my practice with feelings and perceptions of difference or strangeness, and notions of border, boundary and mobility, memory and identity.
