What She Carried

Overview

A VR archive examining memory and migration through personal objects carried across the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. Participants weren't treated as research subjects — they were collaborators with agency over how their own narratives would be preserved and shared.

The Problem

Partition is remembered in numbers — fourteen million displaced, hundreds of thousands killed, borders drawn in six weeks. What the numbers don't hold are the keys kept for houses that no longer exist, the shawls folded into suitcases that crossed in both directions, and the photographs that became the only record of people left behind. What She Carried begins there, with objects.

Approach

1. 01

   Used photogrammetry to render real, carried objects in three-dimensional space rather than illustrate or reenact them.

2. 02

   Layered spatial audio — ambient soundscapes with interview excerpts — to capture not just what people remember, but the manner of remembering, hesitations and silences included.

3. 03

   Took a trauma-informed approach throughout: avoided graphic reenactment, embraced fragmentation and absence, and built a contemplative rather than immersive-for-its-own-sake space.

The things that crossed over

Through in-depth interviews with families across Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, I gathered personal histories tied to the everyday things that survived the 1947 Partition — objects that were carried, hidden, inherited, and quietly passed on. Participants were collaborators, not subjects: they were involved in how their stories would be held and shared, and consent and care sat at the centre of every research decision.

Grounded and suspended at once

Those objects and voices became the material for a VR experience built in Unity, using photogrammetry to bring real artifacts into immersive 3D space. The environments are deliberately neither realistic nor abstract — rooms that feel grounded and suspended at the same time, where objects float in symbolic space and ask to be looked at rather than handled. Users move slowly through objects that each hold a single story, with photorealistic textures set against minimal surroundings, so the emotional weight of the objects stays central.

Not just what is remembered, but how

Sound does as much work as space. Spatial audio layers ambient soundscapes with excerpts from the interviews, carrying not just what is remembered but how it is remembered — the pauses, the corrections, and the things that still don't have words.

Some wounds resist narration

Guided by trauma-informed design, the experience avoids graphic reenactment. It makes room for fragmentation, silence, and absence, recognising that some stories stay incomplete and some wounds resist being told. The aim is reflection without retraumatisation — a space to engage with memory carefully rather than relive it.

Outcome

An installation that functions as both digital memorial and speculative archive — letting visitors engage with large-scale history through individual objects and testimonies, presented at ITP's thesis showcase. As Aliza puts it: "The most powerful thing a designer can do is sometimes simply make space — for memory, for absence, for what couldn't be brought across but wasn't forgotten either."