“When your family has moved multiple times across oceans, continents, and histories, you often don’t have an heirloom to pass down—a wedding necklace, a passport, a tool of your trade. Unlike programmes like Antiques Roadshow, many of us show up without objects but with stories. Digital Heirlooms is our response—a copyrighted process we’ve developed at Nutkhut to preserve and honour intangible heritage in a tangible, interactive way.”
— Ajay Chhabra, Artistic Director, Nutkhut
Reimagining Memory, Migration and the Things We Never Had
Cultural Heritage
Across generations and geographies, many communities shaped by indentured labour, forced migration, and colonial displacement have lost the physical symbols of their past. Unlike cultures that can trace their lineage through artefacts passed down through centuries, descendants of indentured labourers often inherit stories, not objects. There is no drawer of medals, no old family sari, no annotated bible or diary to connect them to their roots.
This is the gap Nutkhut and Artistic Director Ajay Chhabra are addressing through Digital Heirlooms, a new, copyrighted approach that translates memory into immersive digital form. It is not about nostalgia—it is about justice, identity, and belonging.
Working with Associate Artist Lorna Inman and creative technology partners PlayLa.bZ, Nutkhut created Girmit: Multi-dimensional Heirlooms, a groundbreaking 360-degree VR experience first showcased at Mozilla Festival 2021. The project was named ‘Pick of the Festival’ by Director Sarah Allen for its power to humanise the untold story of the Girmitiyas—over 60,000 people who travelled from India to Fiji under British indenture.
Using Tilt Brush, Lorna hand-paints immersive environments and six digital 3D heirlooms that encapsulate fragments of Girmitiya life. These are not reproductions of actual objects, but creative manifestations of oral histories—wrapping emotion, memory, and cultural identity into interactive forms.
From a wooden trunk representing a family’s only belongings to a seedling symbolising generational growth, each object is a multi-dimensional act of remembrance. They live online, accessible to diasporic communities across the world, and serve as bridges between generations who never got to hold the same heirlooms in their hands.
The Digital Heirlooms methodology is more than a tool—it’s a reimagining of what cultural inheritance can look like in the 21st century. In the absence of artefacts, Nutkhut is offering presence. In the silence of history books, they are amplifying ancestral voices through immersive storytelling.
As migration, war, and climate change continue to displace communities across the globe, Digital Heirlooms offers a timely and scalable way to preserve cultural identity. This isn’t the future of memory—it’s the memory of the future.