I Don't Recognize Me In the Shadows

Thana  decided to make this book to figure out how everything happened – to figure out the war, the escape, the transition, and the unfamiliar. It’s not easy to talk about trauma while you’re living in it because you can’t recognize it. Creating this work enabled her to tackle the trauma and to confront it her own terms. The images and the words serve as a record, a healing method to register and validate her emotions and experiences during the transition into the unknown.

“I wanted to offer my own version of the story, one that is infused with my resilient spirit_unbroken, unfailing and devoid of self-pity. I wanted to climb the fences, and I did”

Throughout this journey, Thana took on many roles – She is the storyteller, the photographer, and the person who has gone through these experiences of displacement and asylum. It is empowering to tell your own story to the world. It is liberating. She was not alone and so she hoped to visually articulate people’s struggles to leave countries where conditions of violence, war, and aggression are prevalent. She focused on reflections of personal moments including handwritten testimonies that capture the hopes, fears, dreams, and struggles.