Ana Janeiro

My grandparents didn’t leave a great patrimony after their long life, except the cultural richness they bathed me and my cousins with our whole lives. They did not have many material possessions, nor did they believe in materialism. What they believed in was inner richness and the principles they lived by. Amongst their scarce patrimony, were some photo albums and the letters my grandmother wrote to her mother in Lisbon, during the period they lived in India, between 1951 and 1961.

I have spent my whole life Listening to “stories from India” told by my mother and my grandparents, sometimes I heard different versions of the same stories, but many were left untold… This body of work is a research about their lives during this period. I attempt to unravel and discover what has been left unsaid, sometimes using fiction to fill the voids that remain. Discovering in my family’s personal archive their story and the secrets kept for so long. In the end I got to meet again these to people I knew all my life. Here are some of these stories which are now mine as well