My work evolves from ‘deep listening’ to the oral histories of displaced people. Since 2017, I am working on a project of drawings - Zwischen (between). It is a scratched paper technique to preserve memories through inkless drawings. My artistic research is based on extensive interviews with refugees and immigrants who have experienced violence and loss. In this process, I become a ‘secondary witness’.  At the end of our conversations, I often ask people to name some words which are particularly meaningful to them. The assiduous hand-scratched drawings transform collected memories of home and exile, of floorplans, folk-tales, and the writings of diaspora poets. They are also inspired by maps, landscapes, and transient geographies or shared historiographies crossing Asia and Europe. In my childhood, traveling to historical sites, I found names and words engraved by former visitors on walls and pillars. I find this technique of preserving memory very interesting and provocative. The idea influenced me while I was registering my and other people’s voices about their memories of the home by scratching on paper. Also, as for the material choice, it was a challenge for me; how to preserve deep down memories through inkless drawings. Mostly these conversations are very private, the memory of an individual. So, I decided to transform those people’s Mother tongue into a unique representation of their identity. Mute tongue https://www.ishitachakraborty.com/mute-tongue