Unrooted, Not Unmade

What happens to creativity when your sense of place, language, and even self is constantly in motion? 🌍

In this episode, we explore the quiet, disorienting space where nothing is technically wrong but nothing quite settles either. It’s the gray zone of in-betweenness: where identity feels fluid, expression feels just out of reach, and the usual anchors no longer hold 🧭

“Unrooted, Not Unmade” is a reflection on creating from instability - on how shifting ground can blur your voice, but also reshape it in unexpected ways 🌱✨

Transcript

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So I disappeared, not in a mysterious artistic retreat way, more in a my entire life was in three different suitcases, and I forgot what country I pay taxes in way. The past year and a bit, I've moved three countries. Three. And at this point, I don't even unpack properly anymore. I just kinda rotate identities depending on the season. I am technically based in London right now. As of today. Anyway, who knows for how long? But I'm also in a long-distance relationship. Which means every month we take turns flying to each other, and even when I'm home, I'm kind of not. There's always a wording pass involved, and my life has basically become a calendar of departures. But somewhere between airport lounges and half-unpacked suitcases, I started thinking about something. What happens to your creativity when your geography keeps changing? Not just your address, your geography, your language, your references, your background noise, and your emotional climate? And then the question kind of sharpened. Does artistic identity actually need stability to survive? Or is it forged in instability? Does art need roots at all? Or does it grow from rupture? Because I've noticed something. Every time I move, my creativity doesn't disappear. But it goes gray. Not blocked, not dramatic, not heartbreakingly intense, just gray. And gray is uncomfortable. Because it doesn't justify itself as a crisis. If you're spiraling, at least that's productive in an artistic way. If you're euphoric, great. Go paint something. But gray feels undefined. Kinda like you're suspended between versions of yourself and none of them are fully online yet. And I started wondering whether that grayness isn't actually creative emptiness, but creative liminality. Because if that's true, then the real question isn't just what happens to creativity when you move. It's whether artistic identity needs stability at all. The first time I moved countries as a kid, I thought it was a one-off rupture. Now, after doing it again and again, I'm starting to see it as a pattern. Every relocation rearranges something internally, not loudly, but structurally. And each time my art goes quiet before it reorganizes. I think that quiet has less to do with inspiration and more to do with perception. Because we love the romantic idea that creativity lives entirely inside us, untouched by geography. But artists are shaped by architecture, by climate, by political tension, by social codes, by what is visible and what is unspeakable. So when you move countries, you don't just change scenery. You change the structure of your perception, and perception is the raw material of art. Take someone like Mona Hatum. Born in Beirut to Palestinian parents and later exiled to London, her work emerges out of late twentieth century conceptual and postcolonial conversations around exile, territory, and the body. But it never feels theoretical. It feels physical. Her work doesn't simply reference displacement. It reconfigures how you experience space. In installations like Homebound, which I was lucky to see in Tate Modern in London in 2016, she arranges ordinary domestic objects like kitchen utensils, chairs, tables, etc., inside a caged environment wired with electricity. And yes, the objects are recognizable, they're almost comforting, but in fact they're untouchable, charged and dangerous. The viewer is forced into a position of distance and tension, and the familiar becomes unstable. What's powerful is that this isn't just symbolism. It's perceptual. You enter expecting a home and encounter a threat. Your spatial expectations are interrupted. The work makes you physically feel what displacement does psychologically. It fractures the assumption that space equals safety. The structure of the installation mirrors the structure of exile, proximity without access, and visibility without belonging. That's what I mean when I say geography reshapes perception. Hatum's materials don't just tell us that she experienced exile, they demonstrate how exile alters the way space is sensed. The domestic object is no longer neutral, it carries charge. And that perceptual shift becomes the aesthetic language itself. But displacement doesn't only destabilize space, it also destabilizes language. And that's where someone like Shireen Nishad becomes interesting. Nishad left Iran shortly before the nineteen seventy-nine revolution and was unable to return for years. When she eventually did, she encountered a country transformed, politically, culturally, visually. That rupture became central to her practice. In her Women of Allah series, she photographs women, often herself, holding guns, staring directly at the viewer, their skin overlaid with intricate Persian calligraphy. At first glance, the images are confrontational. The gaze is steady, the weapon is present, but the calligraphy complicates everything. For viewers who don't read Persian, the text becomes purely visual, pattern, texture, ornament. But for those who do, the writing often contains poetry about martyrdom, devotion, longing, and faith. So the body becomes a site of dual readability, visible but partially inaccessible, seen, but not fully understood. And that's where displacement lives. Her work isn't just about exile, it's structured as translation. Between Iran and the West, between visibility and misinterpretation, between political stereotype and personal identity. Translation is never neutral. Something is always lost. Something is always reshaped. Meaning bands depending on who is looking. And when you move countries, you live in that constant state of translation. You adjust tone, you edit references, you rephrase yourself socially, you soften certain edges, and you sharpen others. You become multilingual even when you are speaking one language. That ongoing act of self-translation eventually shows up in the work, not just thematically, but structurally, layered, hybrid, slightly unstable, always negotiating. And I recognize that, that subtle editing of yourself depending on who's in the room. So if Hatoum shows us how exile alters the experience of space, and Nishad shows us how exile alters the experience of meaning, then someone like Mark Bradford expands the idea even further. Because displacement isn't only about crossing national borders. It can happen inside a city, inside a system, inside social hierarchies. Bradford grew up in South Central Los Angeles, surrounded by the visual noise of advertising, billboards, street signage, the layered infrastructure of an urban environment shaped by race, economics, and constant flux. His paintings aren't traditional canvases in the romantic sense. They are constructed from materials pulled directly from the city, merchant posters and papers from beauty supply stores, fragments of advertising layered and sanded down repeatedly. From a distance, they often resemble maps, grids, arterial lines, zones. But up close, there are chaotic accumulations of torn paper, abrasion, residue. He builds them up and then literally excavates them. He sands through layers to reveal what was buried underneath. That process is crucial because it mirrors how cities function, layered histories, erase communities, invisible labor, shifting territories, but it also mirrors how identity functions in displacement. You don't erase the previous layer. You overlay, you adapt, you cover, and occasionally something from underneath breaks through. His abstraction isn't about escaping reality. It's about embedding geography directly into the surface. The city isn't depicted, it's materially present. And that layered instability becomes the visual language itself. So if Hatum destabilizes domestic space and Nishad destabilizes linguistic meaning, Bradford destabilizes surface, the very ground on which the identity appears to sit. That layering, that constant buildup and erosion, isn't accidental. It's a structural response to instability. Movement leaves residue. And Bradford turns that residue into form. What I'm noticing is this that displacement doesn't just influence subject matter, but it reshapes structure. It produces hybridity, layering, fragmentation, tension between familiarity and estrangement. But here's the uncomfortable part. In the short term, that restructuring doesn't feel profound. It feels quiet. Because creativity requires a stable internal narrator, a sense of who's speaking when you make something. When you relocate, that narrator destabilizes. Are you speaking from memory? From adaptation? From performance? From survival? When identity is reorganizing, art hesitates. That hesitation is what I've been calling the gray zone. The gray zone isn't emptiness. It's recalibration. Your nervous system is busy decoding new systems. New bureaucracy, new humor, new ways of occupying space. It's quite exhausting. And exhaustion rarely looks glamorous in an art historical narrative. We love to romanticize rupture. Exile producing brilliance, suffering producing masterpieces. But displacement is often mundane. It's paperwork, it's unfamiliar grocery stores. It's that subtle loneliness. And it doesn't always produce immediate output. But what it does produce is altered perception. As an outsider, you notice everything tone, gesture, architecture, silence. You study what others take for granted. And over time that hyper-awareness becomes depth. So maybe displacement destabilizes artistic identity in the short term, but deepens artistic perception in the long term. Maybe gray isn't creative death. Maybe it's compost. It looks dull on the surface, but underneath something is decomposing and reforming. And maybe that's what the last six months have been for me. Not absence, accumulation, sediment settling, identity layering. We will get into aesthetics, I promise. I did say in the first episode we'd unpack why the internet is obsessed with curated visual identity, and we will. Hopefully not in another six months. But right now this feels more urgent. Because before we talk about how things look, we need to talk about where we're looking from. And what happens when that place keeps shifting. So maybe the question isn't whether artistic identity is rooted in place or forged in rupture. Maybe it's both. Place gives you foundation, rupture gives you dimension. Foundation gives you language, references, rhythm, the initial grammar of who you are. And rupture stretches that grammar. It complicates it. It forces you to translate, to layer, to reconfigure. And if you're constantly in transit, geographically, emotionally, culturally, the art that becomes possible isn't rootless. It's layered. Maybe the gray zone isn't something to panic about. Maybe it's the restructuring phase, not creative death. Creative reorientation instead. And maybe creating from that place, from instability, from translation, from movement isn't weakness, but instead it's multiplicity. Thank you so much for listening. So if we're taking anything from this episode, it's this. Displacement doesn't erase artistic identity, it restructures it. Silence isn't absence, it's movement underneath the surface. And if you're in transit too, between cities, between versions of yourself, between languages, that's not a detour. That's the work. This has been the Ali Palipod. I'm Ali, still technically in London for now. And I'll see you next time.