Roots

They grow up, go to school, and one day find Iran on the geography map. They look at you and want to know where they came from and why. When you migrate, you have to answer all these questions. Your answers are the story of your life. Before migrating to Australia, I was a mechanical engineer. After completing my studies in engineering, I worked in the field and then came to a new country. The new culture is full of things for migrants that even when you roll up your sleeves with all your might to learn them, it still takes a significant amount of your life to understand and apply them. In all these years, I have rarely seen an exception to this, but I do not insist that everyone accept my experience. The world of migration has new things to discover from every angle you look at it. After a period of unemployment and then working with several engineering companies in the new country, one day I asked myself if this was the way of life I wanted for myself? A better salary and living in a bigger house? Is that all? I know that this better salary can provide you with more and easier travel. But you go on a trip and come back, and you are again in the same place you were before the trip. You have taken your camera and spend your days with a few photos from the trip until the next trip comes. It's all good, but for me, all this goodness was not deep. Something in those travel photos pulled me into the world outside of work and was so exciting that it made it hard for me to endure working hours. One day, finally, without hesitation, I asked myself what I wanted to do with my life. Stay here bored until I retire or spend those working hours somewhere else but be happier. Finally, the whistle blew, I packed my desk, set engineering aside, and became a photographer. A photographer who now loves her work passionately, loves children, and is thirsty for answers to find her identity. The concern of 'identity' for me, as a migrant woman currently residing in Australia, is a serious and permanent concern. An identity that has taken on new forms as I crossed the safe and familiar borders of the nest I considered myself belonging to and defined myself with. I started a photography project of Iranian-born babies who are born and are citizens of Australia in April 2016. The images, designed and photographed with backgrounds of Iranian traditional fabrics and patterns in various colors and designs for each child, illustrate the culture, tradition, and roots that the new generation born from Iranian migrants will inherit from their parents, but perhaps they will never have a similar experience and understanding of it - as the previous generations experienced it. Children who will experience a modern, new, and different world in which they were born will establish new values based on their living and growing environment and, of course, may never be able to speak, write, or read poetry in their mother tongue as well as their parents and ancestors. In this collection, the infants are the actors in my narrative of migration. Migration and crossing external and internal borders that result in both the bitter experience of gradual alienation from the formative roots and the beauty of 'birth' that redefines itself and creates a new identity for itself. The small actors in my narrative will certainly seek their roots when they grow up, and perhaps these first photos I have taken of their lives are steps to connect them to their roots. The exhibition of Mana Salasali's photographs has been displayed for six weeks at the Brisbane Multicultural Centre in Australia.