JOURNAL
ENGLISH | 2025

Poster, pages from the journal and work in progress stills

Synopsis

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A young aspiring chef works at a cafe. As they try to navigate through their home and to find belongingness in their surroundings, a diary becomes their way of observing, nothing, and making sense. As readers, what we have in our hands is this diary which went missing a few years ago.

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Artist's statement

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Lost salad and other notes is a fictional diary of a young chef who works in a cafe. This diary began with a desire to depart from autobiographical accounts and personal narratives to reflect on broader aspects of queer lives navigating through the city, negotiating with natal families and belonging in their surroundings. 

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This piece is an account of the chef’s everyday life and thoughts of how they perceive themselves, others and the city. They are constantly running away from their home and returning to it again and again. The things that are holding them back, pushing them to run, the obstacles, dilemmas, fears and excitements create confusions and reflections where till the end we don’t really find the exact answers but we witness them everyday through their mind, their writings and drawings. Each page of the diary attempts to capture something that is fleeting like a moment, a thought, a day, a version of themselves. The drawings and writings sometimes interrupt each other, sometimes complement each other or they exist individually.  

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Public place within the urban space in India sometimes becomes a dangerous threat, a warm embrace or completely invisible cloak for queer folks. The city gives a sense of anonymity, freedom which is completely out of the question in regards to the home associated with the natal family. In this sense of city’s anonymity the roles are stagnant yet reversible, the rules are rigid yet breakable. I wanted to capture these aspects through a personal yet fictional character, place and relationships. Fictional narration helped me reflect on myself while offering space for creative freedom to express. The process of writing this diary was a chaotic yet therapeutic endeavour where it helped me to separate reality and imaginary yet pushed me to weave both. 

The use of diary as a form helped the work to explore semi autobiographical yet fictional and anonymous scenarios of chef’s everyday life. One of the main reasons to use this form was to make way for personal reflections by them which reveals their vulnerability, emotional upheavals, joy of finding answers and a lost self making sense of the world. This work in its entirety is visualised as a missing diary. So it's not in the hands of its owner but in the hands of a reader. It entails that it might reveal very private stories and the reader might experience almost voyeuristic pleasures or discomforts while flipping through the pages.

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About the artist

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Sharvari Deshpande is a freelance artist and illustrator currently living in Pune. Education in Visual arts and gender studies have pushed me to create works that narrate stories, illustrate thoughts, evoke images and ask questions. I am interested in working with children's books, graphic narratives and writing as a form to talk about city, belongingness, identities.

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