How long would it take to walk the whole of Pakistan?
I was born in Quetta, a city surrounded by mountains. Since 2017, I have been walking through Pakistan, and later through Europe, with a camera, sound recorder and notebook. What began as walking became a way of mapping—not only the land, but my relationship to it.
Walking is also how I process grief. I lost my mother when I was thirteen and my father in 2021. With them, I lost not only two people, but parts of the places, homes and landscapes that had made me feel that I belonged somewhere. The land remained, but my relationship to it changed. Places I once knew began to feel unfamiliar. I began walking them again, trying to understand what remains when the people who connected us to a place are gone.
Most of this project takes place in Pakistan. I have walked near and along its borders with China, Iran, India and Afghanistan, trying to get as close to the edges of the country as I can. But Pakistan is not entirely walkable. Some places are inaccessible because of political tensions, security, gender, borders or the sheer difficulty of the terrain. There are places I cannot reach as a woman travelling alone, regions where political circumstances make walking impossible, and landscapes where the terrain itself becomes a boundary. At K2, I have reached Base Camp, but the landscape beyond it is not simply something I can continue walking through.
These limitations have become part of the work.
Living in Belgium, I began to realise something strange: here, I can walk along borders quite freely. I can move towards the edges of countries in a way that is not always possible in my own. This made me wonder: if I cannot walk a part of Pakistan, can I walk it somewhere else?
The goal is not to draw a complete map of Pakistan, line by line. It is to get as close to its borders as I can—to follow the country until the landscape, politics, gender, geography or my own body tells me that I cannot go further.
And then to ask: what happens next?
Will I be able to complete this journey before I die? What borders will stop me? What terrain will remain beyond my reach? What stories will I encounter along the way? And what will I discover about a country by trying to walk it?
The places I cannot reach become new chapters of the project. Kashmir, for example, carries a complex history of division and political tension. Rather than pretending these boundaries do not exist, I want to find ways of walking its memories, landscapes and stories from elsewhere—following their traces across other geographies. Other inaccessible places may require their own forms of walking: through neighbouring landscapes, displaced communities, archives, conversations, memory or imagination.
This is where Pakistan, Outside Pakistan began.
The project is therefore not an attempt to complete a geographical map. It is an attempt to understand how a country can be carried, remembered and reconstructed beyond the places the body can reach.
Since moving to Europe, I have continued walking through Switzerland, Italy, France and Belgium. I trace new landscapes while carrying the old ones with me. Sometimes I walk Pakistan itself; sometimes I walk its absence.
Each walk becomes a line. Each line holds a place, a person, a memory or a story. Some lines are drawn on the land itself. Others are drawn elsewhere, where a part of Pakistan can only be reached through memory, history, conversation or imagination.
For me, Pakistan is no longer only a geographical territory. It is also a landscape of grief: my parents, the homes I have left, the places I can no longer return to in the same way, and the memories that change as I move further away.
I walk to process this grief. I walk because the body sometimes knows how to carry what words cannot. And I walk because I am still trying to find a way back—not necessarily to a place, but to a feeling of belonging.
The map will never be complete.
Perhaps that incompleteness is the point.
What happens to a homeland when parts of it cannot be reached?
Can a place be walked from somewhere else?
What happens to a landscape when the people who made it home are gone?
Can walking become a way of grieving a land, a family and a home at the same time?
Perhaps I am trying to redraw Pakistan from wherever I am able to stand—a map made not only from borders, but from footsteps, memory, grief and distance.