This book emerges from the characters that appear in my film Always Coming Home, featured within the installation of the same name, which was first exhibited at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (1 October 2025 – 3 January 2026).

The installation combines moving image, photography, sculpture and sound to explore transnational identity and the extended trauma of displacement.

This book is an experiment. It references archives and other research materials gathered through the creation of this work in addition to synthesized data to create the conversations contained within this volume.

These conversations, therefore, should be read as a speculative fabulation—an attempt to imagine what these characters might discuss if freed from their original media constraints and allowed to exist in dialogue across time, space, and the boundaries between presence and absence.

Concept Poulomi Basu

Creative Producer CJ Clarke

Design & Production JAPC

Edited by Laura Bowen and George Harwood Smith

Publisher by Focal Point Gallery & East Quay Gallery

Edition of 500

ISBN 978-1-907185-29-8