Meghna Bhardwaj

In the words left by Fatima, a Moroccan woman who reached Italy by crossing the Mediterranean, only one image remains: “I have forgotten everything; I only remember the sea and the waves.” From this testimony emerges Do Mothers Have a Country?, a performance project by Meghna Bhardwaj that pays tribute to the experiences of migrant women for whom journeying, crossing borders, and arriving become existential conditions before they are geographical ones.

Through movement, voice, text, and installation, the artist creates a scenic landscape inhabited by fragmented bodies, mobile roots, and memories that unravel and reassemble. At the heart of the work lies the sea as a place of passage, loss, and possibility, but also as a space where identity and belonging cease to be stable categories.

Developed through encounters with archives and testimonies collected at Casa di Ramia in Verona, the project weaves together personal stories and broader reflections on contemporary migration, questioning what a body leaves behind and what it holds onto when crossing a border.

The visual and installation-based dimension of the work, developed in collaboration with Verona-based designer Ivan Favalezza, helps shape a constantly evolving scenic environment made of objects, materials, and traces that evoke ideas of home, uprooting, and reconstruction.

Amid threads being woven, chairs transformed, and words emerging like fragments of memory, Do Mothers Have a Country? explores both the vulnerability and resilience of bodies in motion, imagining new forms of belonging beyond fixed notions of homeland, roots, and identity.