Composing the Familial: Lina Vincent and Akshay Mahajan Discuss the Goa Familia Project

Family albums and personal photographic collections straddle intimate circuits of visibility as well as public networks of dissemination. As a social practice, family photography presents the ways in which families choose to remember themselves. In doing so, these images produce specific social relations, ideals and effects, while also constructing enactments of togetherness, unity and contentment within their frames. Through its archival lens, the Goa Familia project has prefaced the possibilities that reside at the intersection of orality and photography. In their interactions with families in Goa, Lina Vincent and Akshay Mahajan have found and foregrounded the linkages between the micro-genealogies of inheritances—such as family names—and larger notions of community, class and religion.

The Goa Familia project follows the trajectories of photography and representation in Goa, juxtaposing the physicality of family archives with the more intangible acts of seeing. Vincent and Mahajan have sought to privilege oral histories as a key component of their archival and curatorial practice. Adding to the contextualisations that they seek to excavate, they believe that it is the undocumented, unrecorded histories that offer exciting alternate spaces of remembrance within the archive. In this continuing conversation with Annalisa Mansukhani, Vincent and Mahajan discuss their own proclivities as well as their hope to be able to activate the particularities of the local. They seek to connect narratives around heritage and built history with the nuances of socio-personal documentation that remain deeply contextual to Goa and its residents.

_{(Featured Image: The archive of the Bharne family laid out on the shop counter of their clothing store in Panjim. Image courtesy of Goa Familia.)}

Interview taken on 3 August 2021