hareefaree's website

A Tharavadu is an Ancestral Home/ഈ തറവാട്ടിൽ ഒരു ആത്മാവ് ഉണ്ട്

(2023 - 2024)

A Tharavadu is an Ancestral Home/ee tharavadu oru aatmavu indu was my BFA senior thesis film. It is a stop-motion and "cel" animated mourning of my grandfather (who passed in 2020) and my relationship with my mother tongue, Malayalam. While working on this film I also put together a journal filled with poetry, ruminations and insights into my craft. Its a little personal to be putting on the web, but if you're interested in reading it, please send me an email at mvazhappillyart@gmail.com

'A Tharavadu is An Ancestral Home/ee tharavadu oru aatmavu indu' is a stop-motion and cel-animated short about a young woman who returns to her grandfather’s home in hopes of saying goodbye to his ghost. Instead, she finds only memories of mistranslations and misunderstandings that complicated their lived relationship.

Artist's statement

My parents - ‘brain drain’ immigrants from India - were naturalized in the US a few years after I was born, making me the first American citizen in my family. My tongue is tied to English, while my parents and grandparents both speak mixtures of Malayalam, Tamil, Hindi, Marathi, and English due to their own journeys from Kerala to Mumbai to the States. Because of this literal and linguistic separation from the land I’m meant to come from, I’ve begun to understand my own history through the many cloudy layers and languages it has filtered through. Often, I am struck by how much my distance from the ancestral home - the tharavadu - has framed my life.

I am entranced by the grain, texture, and clutter of old family photos taken on greying-out film, the surreal and often camp intensity of 70s-90s Bollywood films, and the glow of cel animation. I find materiality and maximalism tie me down to the real world. I am taken home by stories that feature women undergoing catharsis - losing themselves to grief, rage, or joy with cameras and words trained on their every move. It is in the gaps that I make tangible the histories that were once only ephemerally accessible to me through the flighty ideas my parents couldn’t quite translate to English, those I could only barely understand in my mother’s-tongues.

My work sits within these distortions and mis-translations, what we lose as we move our homes from place to place. I use labor intensive-processes with heavy focus on material and the stories of lonely, failed girls in order to take up residence in the histories given to me. I create home-worlds for personhoods that are often unanchored to a particular home-land. With each project, I make spaces for us to explore how our homes - abandoned, fled from, or just out of reach - haunt us.