Echoes of Elsewhere: Navigating Belonging in Distant Lands

How do diasporic identities become visible within a nation still shaped by colonial ways of seeing?

How might photography, once a tool of classification and erasure, be recontextualised as a language of care, resistance, and belonging?

Echoes of Elsewhere is a lens-based research project that investigates how photography can act as a site of decolonial practice through the lived experience of the Latin American diaspora in Australia. Drawing on feminist and transcultural frameworks, the work explores how matriarchal memory, domestic space, and community sustain identity across displacement. Through still life, portraiture, and moving image, the project examines how colour, sound, and gestures can reframe visibility, not as exposure, but as an ethical and relational encounter.

Collaborating with family and community, I explore how image-making can subvert colonial hierarchies of vision, transforming the photograph into a space of dialogue and reciprocity. Here, transcultural identity in diaspora becomes a way of decolonising identity — an act of continuity and care that resists assimilation by weaving together the personal, political, and collective. Echoes of Elsewhere asks how visibility might be reimagined not assimilated into dominant narratives, but as a continual process of resistance, remembrance, and becoming.