Case Study
Power, suppression, and exclusion become intertwined and palpable in ostensibly unconnected and unintentional acts, that, when viewed through time and proximity, concertedly sabotage the outnumbered, the outgunned, and the outlanded in the tinderbox of India today. The case study I intend to explore through this residency are experiences and realisations that ring discordant undergirded by the subterraneanities, subdermalities, and subneuralities of violence. They are hostilities that overwhelm time and space, overcast corporeal affectivities, overpower perception and cognition, and wound the individual and the community. They are cruelties that are purposive, somatic, selfish, and collective. Transformation, change, revolution therefore, may also be thought, felt, and pursued with intention, empathy, and togetherness.
Unconcern in the Islands
Separated by 18.36 nautical miles, Nayachar, and the inequitable ambitions of capital, Ghoramara, an endangered island in the Hooghly River as it plunges into the Bay of Bengal, witness the ecological and social rift that widens between itself and Haldia, an industrial town harbouring a major port in West Bengal as it onloads and offloads millions of tons of steel, iron ore, coal, petroleum, chemicals, and parts.
The island, its forests, waters, chars, and lives coalesce into rhizomatic hydrosocial networks, negotiated by the relentless transmutability of the milieu. Its inhabitants are rendered ecological refugees amidst devastating, uncontrollable, and overwhelming riverine constellations. Rising sea levels, worsening soil profile, magnifications of salinity, disintegrating lands, and recurrent tropical cyclones create a shared sense of disassociation, dislocation, and alienation. As its expanse dwindles to 12% of itself in merely over the last fifty years, its inhabitants battle deprivations of civic goods and insecurities of health, food, education, and employment.
The dock complex and the rapid diminishment of contiguous islands were both conceived in the 1960s. Dynamised by the forces of national assertion and international trade economy, Haldia has unfolded into three-laned roadways, streetlights, apartments, universities, hospitals, and all other accompaniments that sustain the vital core of life. Yet all is not well. Migrant populations dwell in tin-roof homes beside those roads, the city’s water supply is dangerously replete with heavy metal pollution, the marine biota is intruded, and the air is thick with sulphurous smog as smoke and particles settle on flowers, terraces, and lungs. The riverbed is dredged to allow the ingress and egress of heavy vessels, and as the displaced silt is forced into depositions elsewhere, new formations interrupt the flow of water which exerts heightened wave pressure on nearby islands, exacerbating erosion and inundation.
This violence of technological excess, colonial disfigurement, governmental apathy, unsustainable industrialisation, resource capture, and ecological marginalisation overlooks the certainty that all earthly fates are intertwined in their conjoint genealogies and tomorrows.
Model
The case study is a circumstance of subterranean, subdermal, subneural violence. The denunciation of planetary naturalities of tidal ebb and flow and terrestrial mutation endeavours to acquit the crystallisation of government, industry, and community elites into apathy, venality, and negligence. It also announces how transactionalities of profit and loss weave convincing cognitive, emotive, material inescapabilities of devastation, disinheritance, and disillusionment amongst those least lucrative and most vulnerable, so that transgressed social contract of monopolised power conditional on everlasting deference to the common good of all is slowly standardised.
Through this residency, I intend to understand how these axes of subterrainianity, subdermality, and subneurality manipulated by violence may be re-envisioned and re-harnessed to touch, feel, and become collective scripts of empathy. The model I will work on will seek to realise, through new historical research, archival rushes, notes, and sound, how upheaval may be provoked through collective scripts of empathy (CSoE). It will perceive the kinesis of empathy as collective artistic practice, drawing from embodied conversations, confluences, discourses, and rituals, to realise how agencies of exchange, co-creation, and convergences engender disruptions and redefinitions of power. It will declare that the same knowledges, affections, and interminglings fostered by regimes of production and power, may also be rethought to undermine them. It will introspect defiance as shared doing-thinking, negotiation, legacies, and the interwovenness of all fears. It will unfold the sedimentations of impossibly artificed conformity, assemblage, and spectacle, and find amidst them something resolutely inimitable, autonomous, and free.
The conception of CSoE contests the context of collective, symbolic, epistemic, and bodily injustice, inequality, and exclusion familiar across the country. It recognises that as custodians of power communicate in a bubble of their hegemonic language,
they constitute nexuses of masculine infringement as spaces exclusionary to all else, embodied among its custodians who surrogate for fleeting landscapes of gangrenous criminality. Intervention into these dialectical hierarchies of stratified signifiers may be imagined through collective, shared, interwoven discoveries of shared scripts of commonality that allow for comingling and coexistence of difference - not through its subsidence into uniformity but through its dynamic potentialities of synthesis. It may be conceived through the perception of empathy as the motive force of dialogic coming-together that also possesses capacities of subterrainianity, subdermality, and subneurality and suffuses beyond territory, skin, and thought. CSoE is therefore the causal bind of empathy and copresence that challenges the capitalistic pedagogies of intolerance, homogenisation, and disrespect to imagine communities of potentiality, love, and hope.
CSoE as envisioned is intentional, affective, granular, associative, and interpretive, challenging the fissures that are splintered between the individual and the collective in thought, art, and knowledge, and seeking the co-construction of agency and structure. It acknowledges the inherent contingency of reality and our positions in this world, it demands the awakening of an empathetic culture of commons that integrates the local and global, human and non-human, and it dissents those polymorphic forces that conjure fabricated fantasies of the consumable everything, everywhere, all at once, upon the fatality of what naturally ought to have been. It ruptures and renegotiates time and space, takes them apart, and reconstitutes the assertions of violence for its revolutionary, praxiological purposes.
In the course of this residency and through the exploration of this model, I hope to introspect how we may embed ourselves in community not through immersion but through discursive selfhood, and fathom how transformation is only possible amidst empathy, revolution is only possible amidst love.
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