Video link:
Prachhi final.mp4
My practice has developed by using the space around me to construct imaginary places of interferences, entanglements, deep voids, debris, delays, alienation, distance, and intimacy through performance. My current focus is on creating art that uses performative film as a methodology to develop a series of participatory and intersubjective engagements probing the boundary between past/present, and real/imaginary. I’m looking at the entanglement of an entity in the form of a female body from the past, creating a conversation using cultural elements like a sari and black braided hair. These ritualistic materials call for lost or absent bodies that become a block of memory in the soil. With this work, I’m also trying to talk about the ancestral memory and experiences that have been disremembered and decomposed, yet leave traces as muscle memory in our bodies.
Performative film with live performance; 8:50mins body, sari, landscape, audio, live narration, words.
Visual work shot on Nikon D850
Soundscapes were collected from archives from my grandfather’s radio and soundtracks online.
Audio was also collected from my grandmother speaking her tongue.
Sunday, August 30, 12.35 am I dreamt of her again.
She appears from a place that reminds her of the Ganga Tonight she and I sit at the ghat as a silent audience to the crackling pyre of her past From where I sit, I see the mirage of her life from the surface
Just like you
She sits there as a living archive I think she is time-traveling through you
Attached to her, is her long braid locking her presence
A sari wrapped tightly around her body
The body has now been d I s c a r d e d d e c o n s t r u c t e d into
nutrients that contain the blocks of her memory.
Golden glitches remain. gleetiches remain
Her tongue sounds slow|opaque
DIS
-remembered
-imagined a secret language
DECOMPOSING into matter that will feed history to another body DECAYING
bodymakingbreaking integrating.
She listens to the songs from my grandfather’s radio Can she Still, hear the echoes of her presence?????
C-L-O-G-G-I-N-G
AMPLIFYINGAMPLIFYINGAMPLIF YINGAMLIFYINGAMPLIFYING in circles circles
She is moving through lost time, to recover the present ToReincarnate Demonstrate Transform her non-determined past
Your past, my past, our past
she keeps disappearing into two worlds, several places trying to contact you, I, me, us, them with her jelly-like cells trying to become another body your body, my body our bodies
Wet collective bodies
B – O – D – I – E – S intertwined
Interdependent \ dependent \ independent
She finally speaks in her post-humous voice, ancient feminine knowledge
“Hold me close, because my absence is yours, theirs, our fictional presence.”
A cosmic end.
Audio link: audio body.mp4
my muted tongue attached to my absent body.
