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ANUBHAV SYAL
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HANDMADE DISASTER
Man has been walking the earth for as long as 350,000 years or more. The reason they traveled and explored the planet was driven by nature. Early man started to move for survival, hiding from predators, in search of food, escaping bad weather conditions and disasters, and away from disease. As the humans started to farm they began to move in search of fertile lands and water. As communities settled, men started to move to hunt, as women moved to farm, collect firewood or berries. We moved away from tribal wars. As imperialism spread, some of us fled, some were moved as slaves to work in far off lands. In recent times we have been moving for better jobs, better lifestyle, opportunity. But the fundamentals have remained the same. What has happened in the course of this movement? We have evolved, we have adapted, we have created, named things, discovered new lands, species. It is a growing bank of knowledge that has been transmitted through carvings, cave paintings, scripts and in the mechanical age through photography, and much of it has happened in the days where no borders existed. In this new world where we have tried to organise everything organising people, food, jobs, supply chains, cultural assimilation, markets and trade, stock exchange - we have organised health care, the civil system, we have even organised protests and demonstrations. From this passion of organising has organised crime and war originated. We have started to feel
an urge to dominate and spread a single kind of identity based on religions, cast, colour and race, which has led to freedom struggles, revolutions and also the creation of borders. In a contemporary world where every identity wants to protect, project and defend itself, the desire to oppress certain populations for personal gain sticks to many of us as sin. Most war has been for commodities and resources, and an overarching desire to “control�. As the common woman in the Middle East is crippled with the condition of her country or community, and now wants to shred that identity, she has no option but to flee, and run helter skelter in a world only too full of borders. The strong cross over and the weak are often left to die in this cruel and abject game of survival. When bales of juvenile turtles struggle to reach the ocean and only a few survive, what differentiates them from these scores of refugees is that the marine reptiles collectively fight nature to preserve life while humans create complex situations and divisive conflicts to destroy it. In such a global context, cultural evolution and exchange become a luxury where the reciprocity is only among dominant cultures, wherein it evolves only within a set of limitations and repeats itself, and is (more often than not) imposed on all the rest. Certain stories, cultures and traditions will be lost forever in trying to cross the starlit borders, but the ones that will make it through, that essence will make the dominant look new.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Anand Syal Moritz Neum端ller Ricardo Cases Joan Fontcuberta Mireia Sallares Irina Tchmyreva La Troupe Eoin Moylan Annadi Syal Sofia Ayarzagoita Paulina Lara Shiv Ahuja Shane Green Duarte Amaral Netto Natalia Queirolo Ruchika Mathur Anass Zekri