Anti-Clocks
Maraa presents the fourth October Jam, a twleve-day festival of creative practices that will take place between 14th-28th October. This festival marks the 4th anniversary of October jam, an annual celebration of Theatre Jam, a monthly forum to trigger dialogues about art and media in the public spaces through practice, performance and expression. It travels across different public and semi-public spaces, also committed to use and reclaim dead, found and empty spaces in the city. Theatre Jam is free and open to anyone who is in search for conversation and collaboration.
Through October Jam this year, we will invite creative practitioners and diverse audiences from across the city to creatively explore a textured experience of time that is not limited by notions of chronology and standardized clock time. Click here to read more on the concept.
anti-clocks will try to reach diverse publics by organizing a series of open events in public spaces that encourage an exploration of time through playful, collective and creative means. All the events are held in public spaces – real and imagined. Scroll down for event details.
Most of the happenings and workshops are participative and are open for the public to contribute. People interested in graffiti, film photography, short videos/films, poetry, storytelling, save your dates, it’s your festival. Theatre Jam is supported by a community of friends, creative practitioners and passers-by, and has been running on hat collections and crowd funding.
All events are free and open to everybody. Voluntary contributions are welcome.
For more details please email us on info@maraa.in or call us on 9880755875 or 8105675350.
Please also check the maraa facebook page for latest updates.
Events
- The Waiting Wall | Wall Installation
- Meditations on Time and Timelessness | Reading
- A late night with Chris Marker | Film Screenings
- The Work of Time in the Age of Digital Reproduction | Talk
- Chala Chali Ka Khela | Musical Performance
- Postcards for the moment | Activity
- City As Dark Room | Photo Exhibition
- Retelling| Storytelling Session
- Black Box | Sound Experience
- Time and Longing | Poetry
- Moving Time | Movement and Performance
- Reeling In Time | Video Exhibition
Dr. Suess’ created the waiting place for a reason. This October Jam, let’s dedicate a wall to all the things we wait for. This wall will also find use for your old belongings – things that you have spent enough time with, things you want to throw away or things you want to let go off – like passport size photographs, old telephones, torn shoes, stinky socks, rag dolls, letters, dead clocks, faded T-shirts, lost earrings, suitcases, audio cassettes, cracked vessels. The wall is waiting for you and your belongings.
Land up with paint dyes, white emulsion, brushes, newspapers, waste cloth, lots of water. We meet at Mota Arcade, and will walk to the waiting wall.
Time came to a stop when / I turned off its tap and / Stilled its flow …
Three texts, speaking of different veins of time and timelessness, come together in three different reading voices. A poetry collection contemplating a state of mind beyond time. A novel that hovers over the primal time of birth of the universe as well as a post-apocalyptic time. And another novel which constructs a house located outside of time.
Readings from 2012 Nights (novel), Solitary beyond Time (poems), and House out of Time (novel). Together the texts and voices create a kind of symphony of timelessness in the midst of ordinary time.
As a tribute to Chris Marker we will be screening La Jetee and Sans Soleil. Both films speak to the idea of time striated by memory that we are trying to explore through this October Jam. Chris Marker was a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist who passed away this year. His investigations of time and memory have deeply influenced our own understanding of them.
We will be screenings these films in a tent, to relive the experience of tent cinemas and drive in theatres prevalent in the 80s in Bangalore.
La Jetée (The Jetty) is a Chris Marker masterpiece. The 28-minute film is a post apocalyptic meditation on time and memory. The film is composed almost entirely of black and white still frames and Marker’s characteristic use of essay style voice over has a hauntingly beautiful impact. The film has often been described as one of the most influential, radical science-fiction films ever made. Duration: 28 mins
Sans Soleil (Sunless) is a Chris Marker tour de force. It is a masterful exploration of time, history and memory through a narration that is part travelogue, part dreamscape and part poetry. Sans Soleil is Marker’s explores the inconsistencies of memory and temporal gaps moving between Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, and San Francisco ties together by the a female narrator who reads from letters sent to her by an imaginary cameraman. Duration: 100 mins with English subtitles
The emergence of photography and film as ‘new media’ at the turn of the 19th century unsettled the ontological stability of visual arts. A century later we see a similar destabilizing of film with the emergence of a wide range of visual practices enabled by digital technology. What are the consequences of the shift from celluloid to digital for film history and film studies? How do we make sense of the shift from the ontological basis of cinema in photography to the emerging realm of the immaterial digital image? If cinema was the time machine what happens as cinema moves into a ‘post filmic’ era. Is the move from analog to digital as seamless as it appears? In this presentation I shall explore a set of questions about cinema, time and the digital moment using examples from experimental films as well as leaked digital objects.
Death hovers over our heads while we play our games of come-and-go! Shabnam Virmani & Vipul Rikhi bring forth the many evocations of Time in the songs of Kabir and other mystic poets – time as death, time as the present moment, time as impermanence and time as a fragility of things. Time as the moment to receive, to act or to wake up! Or even the possibility of our conquering Time by entering the Deathless City. Participate in this experience of time with songs.
Imagine yourself as a traveler in your city, as if you visiting your city after a long time.
Be prepared to estrange yourself from everything familiar to you. You have memories in the city, but you cannot find them. Today, you are no longer looking for them.
You had some expectations from the city. Now, you are in search of them.
You see a different picture today. You wander between scaffolding and debris.
You try to make sense of here and now. But what constitutes of here and now?
You decide to take a ride on the metro, which is still in progress in many parts of the city. It is a significant marker of the present tense. We will take a ride on the metro, and share our thoughts with someone you have not met before.
The exercise:
Create an 4X6 image of the present tense – a photograph, a painting, a collage
Write a letter behind it. You can carry as many postcards as you think will last this journey.
We meet at MG road, Metro station. We take a ride from MG Road to Byappanhalli and back. On the way, give the postcard to someone on the train. After this, we go to a coffee shop to chat about our experiences.
As a culmination of a four day workshop (open to the public), this October Jam, we invite you a photo exhibit that will take you through the experience of time in the creation of an image.
In this digital age, where an image take no more than a few seconds to create, a few more seconds to upload and share, we have forgotten all other senses of time in creating an image. What would it mean to go back to shooting on film, at a time when film will soon be obsolete and out of production. What would it mean to process, develop and print your own images from scratch?
Many decades ago, in times of war and conflict, photographers did not have professional dark rooms to process their images; they made use of dark spaces they found around them. In today’s context, when there is no use for dark rooms, we intend to use the city as a dark room.
The workshop dates are on 13th and 14th of October and 20th and 21st of October. Workshop fees is Rs.4000/- including materials. All you need to bring is your film camera. Participants meet at the Alternative Law Forum, Opposite Infantry Wedding House on 13th October at 11:00 am.
Photographs shot in the workshop will be displayed near the Empire Junction on Church Street
Like poetry stories survive in the valley of their own making. They exist in simultaneity of ages and the oldest mythological stories and fairy tales can speak to the most urgent concerns of our time. Their sidelong glance can often reveal more about our times than direct scrutiny could. They travel through the ages in the tongues and songs of storytellers who spin them in the fabric of their own contexts.
This October Jam we invite you to re-tell a mythological story or a fairy tale as a story of our time
What you need to do:
Pick a mythological story or fairy tale that moves you and retell it for a contemporary context.
The Blackbox is an urban sound project that was started by Abhijeet Tambe in early 2012. With this project Abhijeet explores the story of Bangalore, a city in transition, through the medium of sound. The Blackbox contains fragments of voices and sounds from around the city and it tells stories and makes music with these.
This October Jam, the Blackbox will explore the notion of time and how it affects sounds and spaces to shape our experience of the city. The installation will be placed inside will use live sounds in conjunction with previously recorded material. Join the live sound experience at Russel Market.
Tess Gallagher once defined poetry as a time machine, one that works a little differently from the time machine imagined by H.G Wells; poetry doesn’t send us out like lonely projectiles into the past or the future, it draws into itself the events and beings from all possible past, present and future contexts of the speaker. Because of its refusal to be contained by universal time we turn to poetry when longing disturbs our own experience of clock time.
We have turned to poetry to speak of how time stretches itself into eternity during the agonizing wait for a phone call from an object of desire. We have turned to it to speak of the desire to turn back time spent with a beloved. Poetry has been our refuge whenever longing has unmoored time from the anchor of chronology.
We invite you to bring with you a poem that speaks of an experience of time altered by longing.
Walk with dancers and performers down Brigade road in day light and street light. As footpaths shrink and streets widen, experience shifts in time on a performative walk. The performers will walk all the way down Brigade Road to create an experience for passers-by on the street. They will walk down the same road at two different times on the same day. The idea is to experience the encounter of body and space in two different time zones. How do our bodies move in public space? Does space define the way your body moves? How does the spectator’s gaze determine the way you move in a public space? We invite you to walk with the performers on the street. Observe and share your experiences at the end of the walk. If you are a dancer or a performing artist, contact Deepak Kukri on 96323-95035
The curse of the modern era is that the time of man has expelled the time of the gods. Until the advent of the clock and the calendar, time was a varied set of perceptions, now; it is a unit of measurement. But clock-time hasn’t just tracked time, it has produced a time- a standardized universal time that dissects our days and hours into discrete chunks; i.e. productive, unproductive, work, leisure, chunks that are valued or devalued on the grounds of their tradability.
We are aware that our lives exist outside of this “official” clock. What does it mean to be living in these times today – of fragmented moments and growing desires? Are we running late or catching up? How can we time now – a now-that-is-no-longer, a now-that-is, and the not-yet-now? What happens when time is suddenly unmoored from the anchor of chronology? What happens when time stretches itself into eternity during the agonizing wait for a phone call from an object of desire? What happens when time folds in on itself in the dark belly of a cinema hall where you traverse ages in the span of 120 minutes? What happens when the encounter with an image places you in divergent, convergent and parallel times?
This October Jam will end as a response to the idea of a layered time. Open for anyone to participate. Entries to be sent in by 20th October, an independent jury will decide on the videos that will be screened at the exhibition on 28th October, this will be followed by a performance by Sumathi Murthy. To send a video and participate contact: 9880755875