The Sacred Third: Fractured Stories of Identity

Project Production : Graduation Project-Individual (2026)

Skillsets / Softwares used : ADOBE PHOTOSHOP | ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR | ADOBE INDESIGN | ADOBE PREMIERE PRO | FIELDWORK DOCUMENTATION

Creative Disciplines : BRANDING & IDENTITY | VIDEO PRODUCTION & EDITING | ART DIRECTION | PRINT & PUBLICATION | ADVERTISING & SOCIAL CAMPAIGNING | SOCIAL IMPACT DESIGN | VISUAL ETHNOGRAPHY

Project Summary

The Sacred Third is my final-year project exploring how work, stigma, and cultural representation shape the lives of transgender communities in Bengaluru, India. Using re-storytelling as a core methodology, the project foregrounds dignity, struggle, and memory beyond tokenistic representation. Through fieldwork, interviews, observation, and documentation, it examines everyday life — focusing on labour, cultural practices, and the structural barriers surrounding employment. The project seeks to understand how identity is lived, negotiated, and sustained, while highlighting how communities create their own systems of support, resilience, and belonging in the absence of broader social acceptance.

Concept and Inspiration

This project was inspired by a need to move beyond reductive portrayals of transgender communities and instead centre lived realities through deeper, sustained engagement. By examining both historical cultural significance and present-day social marginalisation, the work investigates the fractures between visibility, dignity, labour, and representation.

Development Process

Extensive fieldwork in Bengaluru, India, engaging directly with transgender communities through interviews, observation, and shared lived experiences.
Documenting daily life, livelihoods, workplaces, and cultural practices through photography, videography, and written reflections.
Research into social, economic, and cultural systems shaping third-gender identities in India.
Applying re-storytelling as a design methodology to translate lived experiences into visual, editorial, and documentary outcomes.

Challenges, Reflections and Key Takeaways

This project expanded my understanding of design as a practice that goes beyond communication — becoming a tool for listening, documenting, and representing with care. It challenged me to work ethically within sensitive contexts, balancing storytelling with responsibility, while reinforcing the role of design research in creating socially grounded work that preserves dignity, complexity, and lived truth.

Awards & Recognitions

Selected to present at Trans/Mission 2026, LASALLE College of the Arts’ curated interdisciplinary research conference showcasing outstanding final-year projects and experimental practices across design and arts.

Nominated to represent LASALLE, UAS at Curtin University’s “Communication Design from Around the World” Exhibition 2026 in Perth, Australia.

Read full dissertation here View the website here View my CPJ here

Poster Series

The poster series centres transgender women as protagonists of their own narratives, reclaiming visibility and authorship through portraiture, typography, and personal testimony. Each poster combines visual symbolism, cultural ornamentation, and excerpts from interviews to highlight individual identities, livelihoods, and lived realities.

Main Publication Deliverable

The main publication serves as the core narrative archive of The Sacred Third, bringing together interviews, observations, photographs, and cultural references gathered through fieldwork in Bengaluru, India. Structured around themes of labour, stigma, representation, and belonging, it documents the everyday realities of transgender women beyond simplified or tokenistic portrayals.

Series of Publications

The series of publications expands the project into smaller, participant-focused narratives that preserve stories in a more intimate and personal format. Each booklet centres on one individual, weaving together interview excerpts, observations, photographs, and reflections from shared spaces and routines. Together, the series reflects the diversity of experiences within the transgender community while exploring themes of work, memory, care, survival, and chosen family through grounded, everyday moments.

Calendar: Time Almanac of Lived Days

The Time Almanac of Lived Days is a speculative calendar designed for transgender women navigating irregular work, unstable income, and everyday uncertainty. Inspired by household calendars commonly found across Indian homes, the project reimagines time not through productivity, but through lived experience. Using a sticker-based symbol system, participants can mark different rhythms of daily life, including work, waiting, rest, care, income, and emotional states, creating a visual record of experiences often left undocumented. Developed through conversations and user testing, the calendar acknowledges forms of labour such as traffic signal collection, ritual blessings, caregiving, and informal work, while also recognising obligations and emotional and physical wellbeing. Rather than functioning as a tool of surveillance, the almanac becomes a personal archive of resilience, memory, and self-recognition within lives shaped by precarity and social exclusion.

My Box of Earnings

My Box of Earnings reimagines the familiar piggy bank as a reflection of irregular labour, survival, and financial movement within transgender communities. Designed as a portable object with a shoulder strap, the box acknowledges the mobility embedded within everyday livelihoods such as traffic signal collection, ritual blessings, and informal work across the city. Instead of organising money through conventional categories like savings or investment, it separates earnings according to lived forms of labour; including signal collection, ritual blessings, other work, and daily expenses.

A Short Documentary Film on the lived realities of transgender women in Bengaluru, India. It beings together conversations, enviornments and everyday moments of survival, including the different livelihood practices followed by this group of people.