Songs from hill and land (On-going)

Songs from Hill and Land is the second chapter following the previous project The Becoming, to look at how rigid social structure affects young working-class masculinity. It is a tribute to the young, transnational, working-class men of Nepal who leave their rural homes to seek work in Kathmandu. Compelled by duty and shaped by social heritage, these men—often from lower castes and marginalized communities—migrate to the capital, where they labour to expand the ever-growing city, sometimes quite literally by hand due to limited access to modern tools or machinery. In building the foundations of national progress, they themselves live in a constant state of displacement—between village and city, tradition and modernity, belonging and invisibility.

While their physical migration is driven by economic necessity, it also triggers a quiet emotional migration: a negotiation between inherited identities and the desire for self-definition. This photo series brings these young workers into focus—not merely as labourers, but as men navigating multiple worlds and expectations. Drawing inspiration from Bollywood and Nepali cinema, as well as vintage studio portraiture, the workers co-create fictional personas set within their real-life work environments. These staged portraits become acts of reclamation—temporary sanctuaries where they can play with identity, perform desire, and imagine new versions of themselves beyond displacement.

Social media images contributed by the workers add a contemporary layer to this exploration. Often adorned with filters or generated by AI, these images reveal how digital space becomes another terrain of negotiation—a place where masculine ideals are reinterpreted and remade, distinct from Western paradigms and yet deeply influenced by global visual culture.

Rather than aiming for documentary realism, the work embraces performance and

fantasy as a way to access deeper truths — not just about how these men live, but how they dream, desire, and wish to be seen. At its core, the project is an exploration of visibility, agency, and the complicated gaze of migratory identities.