BELONGING is an ongoing documentary and portrait project that examines how people from different cultural backgrounds experience home, displacement, identity, and social presence in Konstanz, a city shaped by visible and invisible borders.
Through portraits and recorded conversations, the project focuses on individuals whose lives are rarely centered in public representation: women, workers, refugees, teenagers, mothers, researchers, and others whose everyday existence carries the weight of transition, adaptation, memory, and resilience.
This work is not about illustrating diversity.
It is an inquiry into what it means to belong — socially, emotionally, culturally, and physically — in a place that may offer safety, but not always rootedness.
Each portrait and testimony contributes to a wider reflection on migration, vulnerability, and the quiet ways people construct meaning and presence within unfamiliar environments.
This project was initiated with the support of the City of Konstanz, SKI (Stabstelle International Konstanz).
Artistic Position
In this project, I am interested in the space between arrival and belonging.
I approach photography not as extraction, but as a form of attentive presence. The people I work with are not “subjects” in a social theme. They are individuals whose experiences reveal how belonging is negotiated through language, memory, loss, labour, care, and survival.
Belonging is part of my broader artistic practice, which explores vulnerability, transformation, and human dignity. It asks how a person continues to build inner and outer life while living across geographical, emotional, and cultural borders.
Process
The project is developed through conversations, long-form listening, and photographic encounters shaped by time, trust, and mutual respect.
Participants are invited to reflect on questions such as:
What does belonging mean to you?
When does a place begin to feel like home?
What remains unresolved in the experience of migration, transition, or starting over?
How do identity and memory continue to shape the present?
Interviews are conducted by Kee Alina Ushcheka. Portraits are created by Kee Alina Ushcheka in natural light and with a slow, attentive approach that allows presence to emerge without staging.
Many meetings take place in Konstanz, often beginning with a conversation before the act of photographing. In this way, the project grows not through visual collection, but through relationship.
Context
I came to Konstanz after years of movement, displacement, and long-term witnessing across many countries. This city became a place of pause, but also a place where new questions emerged.
Here, I began meeting people who, like me, were not originally from here yet were trying to build life, meaning, and continuity in this environment. Some arrived through choice, some through necessity. Some are rebuilding after rupture. Some live between languages and cultural codes. Some carry visible biographies of migration; others carry quieter forms of dislocation.
These encounters became the foundation of Belonging.
What began as a local intercultural initiative developed into a larger artistic and documentary investigation: not simply who lives here, but how people inhabit a place that may never, uncomplicatedly, fully become theirs.
Project Development
Belonging is developing as:
photographic book
exhibition project
long-term archive of portraits and testimonies
socially engaged artistic platform for reflection on identity, migration, and belonging
The project is intended not only as documentation but also as a space for visibility and recognition.
Participation / Collaboration
The project is open to further participants and collaborators.
I welcome contact from people who:
live in Konstanz and come from another cultural or national background
experience life between languages, countries, memories, or identities
carry a personal history of migration, rupture, resilience, or redefinition
are interested in supporting the book, exhibition, or curatorial development of the project
If this project resonates with you, you are welcome to get in touch.
