In Conversation with Demelza Okwan from the Develop Collective

From Home to Home is a publication created by The Develop Collective 2026 at The Photographers’ Gallery. This year’s Develop Collective includes artists Chandni Raithatha, Demelza Okwan, Tati Mallah, Jasmine Sandhu and Soumia Sadoun.

The publication explores the experiences of five women, each from a different diaspora, through archival and contemporary photographs and through stories. It frames home not as a fixed or singular idea but as an ongoing, collective conversation. From Home to Home contributes to a wider dialogue on belonging, visibility, and the evolving fabric of one of the world’s most diverse cities – London.

From Home to Home explores ideas of home, memory, and belonging. What inspired your collective to create this project?

Meeting for the first time, we noticed many uncanny similarities between us. Shared perspectives as well as an overlap in our work despite being from different places. After we did initial mind mapping, it was clear we were drawn to themes of belonging, diaspora, and nostalgia.

We all had a deep appreciation for our heritage and London, so we knew from the start we wanted to highlight this part of our identities. To gain a clearer understanding of how to present that huge topic, we looked at our own experiences and family archives. We had over 500 photos! When looking at them all printed out, as well as reflecting on our cultures and our relationships to our surroundings, naturally, home became the common thread. 

This work also felt timely. With the rise of anti-immigration sentiments, we wanted to celebrate personal stories of movement and diasporic identity and meet these topics with sensitivity and humanness as a direct contrast to overstated political narratives.

The book brings together the perspectives of five women from different diasporas. How did collaborating within a collective shape the approach to making the work?

Working with women from different diasporic backgrounds on this project amplified the care taken. It felt like we had a responsibility to each other to do the best we could. Handling everyone's unique stories, family archives and personal perspectives, we had a responsibility of care to each other to work with sensitivity and respect for our similarities and differences. Conversely, after building a lot of trust through the bookmaking process, we also began to push each other to grow further.

At one point I was overthinking things like how I wrote certain words or the way my film photos came out, but they grounded me. I started to overthink less and create better work because I felt safe with them. Overall, I think that the care taken, not just for the work but for each other, enabled beautiful results.

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How has creating this project changed the way you think about your own relationship with home?

For all of us, this project has really opened up the ways we think of home. It's allowed us to reject linear thinking around the topic and really interpret home in ways we hadn’t done before. I’ve questioned my place in this city many times, but this project reminded me I do feel at home here, yet I also feel it somewhere else too. I've accepted the fact my notion of home will continue changing over my life.

I think From Home to Home has also made me more conscious of the memories places hold and even more so of how places shape us. This was uncovered mostly through our conversations as a collective – it was beautiful to have experienced and felt the same nuances across our hybrid cultures and years living in the city of London. I feel grateful we had this opportunity to reconnect with these aspects of home and our identities in this way.

Can you tell us about the visual language of your work? How did you develop your style, and were there any influences that informed it?

Because of so much overlap in all our experiences, we made the decision to combine all our work into one without any separation or labels. Instead, everyone's work is woven together and less about us as individuals but a collective story and feeling.

We loved aspects from a large range of books, from cookbooks like Tami Aftab’s to newsprint like Aria Shahrokhshahi’s. We didn't really have one clear reference, but we quickly knew we wanted to have an interactive element in our book. We first explored this using the Autofoto photobooth to photograph objects from our homes.

As the chapters developed with the emotionality and narrative, the visual language and style became clearer as we decided we wanted our book to mimic a notebook or diary, with a handwritten text element.

We collated so much photography, both archival and new material, on 35 and 120 film. Our shoot day at Park Royal and Southall gave us time to notice textures, colours, and feelings of community spaces. After seeing all the images physically, our selected photography seemed to follow the same patterns of sensitivity, intimacy and subtle charm. The writing matched this as we began to fragment our written pieces across pages and chapters to inform the narrative.

In the end, the physical elements of layering, translucent pages, collaged postcards and bookmarks – helped to emphasise the never-ending journey of finding and recognising home, as well as the continuation of these ideas and stories through the reader’s relationship with the book.

Is there one photograph in the book that holds particular significance for you? What is the story behind that image?

In the first chapter, ‘Home is What’s Left Behind,' there's a double-page spread that feels significant for me. It is a black and white image of my grandfather before he left Ghana for the UK. Layered underneath is the black and white kente cloth my family wore at his funeral. It's special because it pays homage to him and what he and my grandma left behind for their future family. It feels like it captures both the beginning and the end in a beautiful way.

One piece of text that feels very significant is in the last chapter, ‘Home is a Conversation'. It reads:

The language I can hardly speak, comforts me to just listen. At least I can always understand the language of food’

It’s placed alongside Jasmine Sandu’s beautiful photography of her grandma peeling garlic cloves. I love it because it encapsulates a very bittersweet feeling yet also summarises the deep love of food from our cultures we all share.

What do you hope readers feel or reflect on when they spend time with your work and with From Home to Home as a whole?

We hope others can see themselves in the book and recognise the stories as a reflection of their own in some way and feel a sense of safety in it.

Finally, what comes next for you as a collective??

We are really proud of what we’ve created over the past 6 months, and we’ve especially loved working as a collective, so we are exploring opportunities to extend our work together. We are currently looking into possibilities such as reprinting From Home to Home in more editions. We'd love to curate exhibitions and deliver workshops and talks both at The Photographers’ Gallery and beyond. Individually, everyone is continuously evolving and deepening their artistic practices. Stay tuned!

For more information visit The Photographer's Gallery

Written by: Bridget Eke