This Master’s thesis is a photographic project exploring the emotional and psychological experience of voluntary migration. It focuses on invisible states during the first months of settling into a new country: uncertainty, loneliness, displacement, identity transformation, and existing between two places.

Grounded in interviews with Iranian migrants in Switzerland, the project translates shared emotional experiences into staged self-portraits. Through the body and bubble wrap, a material associated with protection and transportation, the work develops a visual metaphor for vulnerability, adaptation, and rebuilding a sense of belonging.

By combining self-portraiture, staged photography, and material experimentation, the project develops a metaphorical visual language that translates invisible emotional experiences into photographic form.