Visual Narrative: Liminal Gali

Liminal Gali is a visual witness from the terrace of my ancestral house in Eruvadi, Tamil Nadu, an intimate study of movement, gendered space, and everyday rituals captured in black and white frames on my Android phone.

The series asks what it means to record a community when the recorder is both kin and outsider.

As a daughter who moves between guest and outsider, I witness routines I cannot join — errands, school runs, the quiet choreography of mornings and evenings. The series holds both reverence and inquiry: what does it mean to observe without intervening? Who carries the weight of continuity here and who slips beyond view? These images are small testimonies to lineage, to daily labor, to the social architecture that shapes women’s movement, and to the way memory gathers in lanes that seem ordinary until you stop to look.

In the moment that I capture them mid-stride, a person or cyclist in motion, one foot raised kinetically and the other filled with potential, I sense into the stillness, their bodies appearing at rest in the photo, stationary objects pulled into the gravity of a lane that’s steeped in history.