During my MA studies at the Royal College of Art in London, I lost my grandfather amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unable to return home, I experienced his final moments through a phone screen. I remember the moment his breathing support was removed. I was on the other side of the screen, crying uncontrollably.

I buried myself in work, trying not to think about what had happened.

Until, on my grandfather's birthday, in the same year he died, Xiaomi, the dog who had been by my side for so many years, passed away too.

Something in me finally broke.

I remember crying on my bed in London until I could barely breathe. And then, I decided to face what I had been trying so hard to avoid.

I wrote a long diary entry. About my grandfather. About Xiaomi. About loss, and everything I had been unable to say.

I shared it on WeChat Moments. The platform told me it had been successfully published.

But my friends told me they could not see it.

What happens when someone disappears not only from the physical world, but also from the digital spaces where we attempt to remember them?

Borders had separated me from the physical world of those I loved.

Now, an invisible digital boundary seemed to separate my memories from others.

What was left for me?

This became part of my graduation project at the Royal College of Art: Lost & Ghost.

The first ghost emerged through an augmented diary.

The second took shape through a performance.

I gathered fragments of my grandfather's and Xiaomi's lives: photographs, moving images, memories we had shared, a death certificate, and traces of the time I had spent struggling with their absence.

I brought them together into a video.

At the Royal College of Art, I found a small room.

In one corner stood a desk, illuminated by a single lamp.

I tried to reconstruct the space in which I had lived through those months — working endlessly to escape my grief, and collapsing under its weight when I could no longer keep it away.

And then, I placed myself inside it.

Images moved across my body.

Memories, past and present became entangled upon my skin.

I became a vessel.

The past was not behind me. It moved through my body, becoming entangled with the present.

This was molecular mourning.

An attempt to encounter my trauma through the body, rather than continue running from it.

After the performance, I embraced members of the audience. Some told me that although they had not experienced the same kind of loss, they had felt an overwhelming emotional connection. They spoke of resilience. Of the capacity to endure, to feel, and to continue living.

I had studied Digital Direction. I had spent years working with screens, images and technologies.

And yet, in the presence of death, I was reminded of something that no digital image could fully replace.

The weight of another body.

The warmth of an embrace. The possibility of mourning together.

But the story did not end there.

Our group exhibition was held at Outernet in London.

My work had been tested and exhibited successfully during an earlier stage.

Yet, when it came to the final exhibition, the work repeatedly failed the photosensitivity safety checks.

I was told that certain frames might trigger seizures. I removed them. But the work still failed. I revised it again. And again. Until the very last day of the exhibition, I was still trying.

It never passed.

The work I had created to explore disappearance was itself unable to appear as intended.

Once again, a technological system determined what could be seen.

Once again, I found myself on the other side of an invisible boundary.