Where We Land is a photo-transfer collage series that reclaims the overlooked history of indentured labourers brought to South America and the Caribbean after the abolition of slavery. Between 1838 and 1917, more than two million Indians and South Asians were transported under exploitative contracts to work on sugarcane plantations across colonies controlled by the British, French, and Dutch Empires, including British Guiana (now Guyana), Suriname, French Guiana, and Trinidad.

Colonial postcards from this era often depicted women—referred to at the time as ‘coolie belles’—dressed in lehenga cholis, ornate jewellery, and jhumkas, posed before lush, staged backdrops that cast the islands as exotic and desirable. The term ‘coolie,’ a racialised slur used throughout colonial systems to describe low-wage labourers from India and South Asia, was paired with ‘belle,’ the French word for beauty, to transform these women into icons of servitude and seduction. These images, once tools of propaganda, erased identities and turned lived experiences into a spectacle.

These visuals are not only collaged but physically stitched; thread sewn into the images marks borders and cuts through bodies, drawing attention to the lands divided by European empires and the women caught within those systems. The act of sewing becomes both wound and mending, a way to expose how power was imposed, and how memory resists erasure.

The collages challenge the colonial gaze and reimagine these women not as nameless figures, but as central to the story of migration, labour, and survival.  They speak to the violence of displacement and the legacies carried in diaspora. Through image, thread, and intervention, Where We Land reframes a history of domination into one of remembrance and agency.

Through collage and stitching, thread becomes both wound and mending, marking borders and reclaiming agency. These women reemerge as witnesses to migration, labour, and survival as holders of memory within diaspora.