I presented my research, Pakistan, Outside Pakistan, which begins with one question: how do you walk a country when parts of it cannot be reached? Some places in Pakistan are closed to me because of politics, security or terrain. So I am planning to walk the whole of Belgium as the parts of Pakistan I cannot walk, letting one landscape stand in for another. The walk circles between the two countries, carried by memory.

Technology and mapping became part of these walks. Maps and recordings turn each walk into a line, so a Belgian route can be read next to a Pakistani one. The digital body belongs here too: the phone, the recorder and the map carry my walking body and my memories, so a walk in Belgium can hold a mountain far away. In this way, ecological change, locative media, the digital body and collaborative mapping all became part of how I walk.

I walked along the river with others, took part in conversations, and wrote about what a walking route along the whole river could become, as part of an alliance of care for the SZenne. I also made small clay pebbles, to be fired in a kiln and placed in the river so they would become part of it. For me, the work was about giving something back to the earth that holds us.

For this project I worked with drawing, walked the paths of the landscape, and shared my own story of how walking, and displacement through water, have been part of my life. In the mountains of northern Pakistan, I saw floods push families out of their valleys. Water can bring joy and life, and it can also bring loss, whether there is too much of it or too little.

I took part in this workshop led by Wei Leng Tay, a space for artists working with photography-based practices to think together about images and their relationship to society. Through discussions and peer exchange, I shared my own work and talked about how to develop the circular paths I walk with. The conversations helped me think about how an image, a walk and a memory can return to each other, and how my practice can grow from there.