Samika Prupas is a designer and artist based in
Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Canada, primarily working across publication design, photography, and documentary videos. She moves between the digital and the analog, drawn to anything that lets her tell a story, make images, or work with her hands. Her practice often wanders through time, memories, archives, and dreamscapes, with a particular fascination for the fleeting qualities in everyday life.
She is in search of freelance work for publication/ephemera design or photography!
sprupas@gmail.com
@samikaprupas
Dead Mail
PHOTO SERIES - April 2025
35 mm
Kodak Ultramax 400 35 mm
Dev & scans by Borealis
Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, QC
What does it mean to grieve for someone you never really knew?
According to my adoption documents, I was found on November 4, 2002, at 7:30 am in front of an apartment building across the street from the Nanping Yanping District Welfare Institute. I was estimated to be about five months old at the time.
Nearly a year later, on October 13, 2003, I was adopted by my parents and brought to Canada. I’ve been told that during my stay at the orphanage, my nanny and I grew very close, and we were both devastated when I was adopted. In the photos my parents took of our first days together in their hotel room, I look distressed and confused. I wouldn’t let them hold me or even touch me. They joke that it's because I had never seen a white person before and their large noses scared me, which very well could be true. Over time, with the help of my older sister, who had also been adopted from China six years prior, I slowly began to warm up to them.
In 2015, when I was twelve, my mom and I returned to China with a group of adopted families. We toured some of the larger cities before visiting our respective orphanages. At mine, I spent a day with the staff, including my former nanny. When we showed her a photo of us when I was an infant, she began to cry, and I found myself comforting her. It was a strange experience because I had no recollection of her. To me we were strangers. Only later did I realize for a brief period of time, she may have felt like my mother. We did not stay in touch after that day and I soon forgot about the brief reunion, resuming my life back in Toronto.
Ten years later, I dreamt of her. We met beneath a large winding tree. Somehow we both knew we would find each other there. We did not speak, only stood there quietly staring at one another. The imagery from that dream stuck with me and inspired Dead Mail, a film photography series that explores my lost connection to my life in China before adoption. Based around my fleeting connection with my former nanny, Dead Mail becomes both a gesture of reconnection and a reckoning with distance and memory.