Simaa Al-Saig

My roots lay in Iraq. Moumen’s roots lay in Algeria. We grew up re-rooted in the West, like trees ripped from their native soil and placed in foreign ground. When we came together, we recognized shared histories carried in our hair, our eyes, and our skin. Amid a world of confusion, we found a sense of home in one another.

This project centers on the intimate conversations Moumen and I share, dialogues shaped by the experience of losing a sense of history and navigating processes of re-rooting as children of the diaspora. Alongside these exchanges, I draw from personal journal entries written over the past eleven years, tracing the evolution of these reflections from adolescence into the present. With photographs gathered from archival material, alongside images Moumen and I have taken ourselves, I seek to document the timelessness and universality of this experience.