Poulami Saha
‘Fragment of Shrinking Shore’ responds to The Strange Everyday: Rethinking the Ordinary by re-examining fish scales, materials embedded within daily acts of cooking, cleaning, and eating, yet consistently overlooked and discarded.
Growing up in Bengal, where “mache bhate bangali” reflects a way of life, fish is not just sustenance but identity. Within this familiarity, what remains, the scales, quietly disappears from view.
This project begins from that moment of removal. By collecting and transforming discarded fish scales into biodegradable sequins, leathers, papers, and composite panels, it questions how value is assigned and withdrawn within everyday systems of consumption. It also emerges from a concern with synthetic embellishments such as sequins, whose afterlife as microplastic pollution often returns to the same coastal ecologies and fishing communities that sustain this cycle.
Rather than introducing a new material, the work reconsiders one that already exists. The discarded becomes a resource, carrying cultural memory, material potential, and the possibility of supporting livelihoods. In this shift, the familiar is not replaced, but seen again, with care.
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