Imaginarium of Sensuous Experiments was envisioned as a new lens to rediscover the city, which will allow for speculation, immersion and discussion. The Imaginarium offered multiple experiences; the onus was on the journey and the traveler.
All works chosen for the Imaginarium were directed towards producing playful sensory experiences. Reimagining the space with these experiments invoked an altered perception of the city we inhabit – estranged and familiar at the same time; an experience of the city derived from our senses.
Featured works:
WALKS
The Olfactory Chambers of Ward 88: A walk in and around drains and dumps in Ward 88 tracing the journey of the garbage bag. The walk is rooted in the labor practices involved in garbage collection and disposal.
Look After Your Belongings: A walk in the Shivajinagar market, from the perspective of the sidewalk. An attempt to write and include histories that are in danger of being erased and silenced; to record and mark evictions and displacements in the city.
Hello, Said the Night: An invitation to explore and encounter and make new interpretations of the night and the body venturing out at night. Beyond the vocabulary of fear and risk, can the night offer an alternate meaning of the city, a different relationship with the body?
EXHIBITIONS
When Forbidden Figures Occupy the Park: In order to register our protest against violent gentrification, moral policing and arbitrary evictions from the public park we made scarecrows with people we met in the park. The scarecrows are ‘missing persons’ and ‘forbidden figures’ in the park. They stand defiant, sharing memories and experiences: crude reminders of all things forbidden.
The Memory of a Deluge, Srinagar Art College: We wanted to reach out to understand artistic renditions and vocabularies of damages and fissures that survive in climates of flux. We hosted an exhibition by art students in the Srinagar Art College, in the wake of the destruction of their College in a Flood in Autumn, 2014. The exhibition was based on the objects that had emerged from the flood waters in Kashmir. The memories of what the flood waters left triggered short stories about the objects – some tragic, some hopeful, some enigmatic.
PERFORMANCES
Purabiya Taan – An evening of Bhojpuri Songs and Poems
Purabiya Taan was conceived as a third space born through music and performance. A space claimed within the city, for the migrant worker, outside of work and home. To assert presence through longing, to remember and to temporarily forget. A love letter from a chameleon city, for the worker. Purabiya Taan featured an evening of bhojpuri songs, performed by Kalpana Patowary and her band.
Indian Folk Band
Indian folk band is a group of musicians, from various slum areas within Bangalore. Using particularly leather instruments, their intention is to challenge oppression through the language of folk music. They performed in various public spaces during the imaginarium, to play for diverse audiences in the city.
CINEMA
We curate and screen films in unlikely places, encouraging unlikely thoughts. We search for films that speak to our times, in all its filth, beauty and horror.
Strike | A Film Festival on Labour
Strike Looked at various forms of worker resistance along with the the poetry of labour in a rapidly mechanizing world.
She is not asleep | Films on Vampires, Cats and Women
‘She is not asleep’ was a film festival that explored questions of gender, sexuality, violence and justice. The intent was also to show the cyclical nature of creation and destruction.
Song Trails | Films on Music and Migration
Song Trails comprised of six films on music and migration, set against a vast expanse of time and born out of different contexts.
You Live Here | Films on Cities
You Live Here is a film festival that looks for meanings between the debris and skyscrapers of cities. The films explored the absurdity and contradictions inherent in processes of urban development and transformation.
Cinema Burlesque | Films on Absurdities and Oddities
The film festival is curated as a two hour showreel of different genres of film – silent, stop-motion, fiction, documentary, anime and GIFs in search of new ideas around movement, desire, fantasy and the future.
We imagined the city as a circus. The circus doesn’t desire to hide and doctor pain, joys and ‘extreme’ feelings into acceptable forms that need to hide behind the mask. The mask in a circus is show, not hide. We will recognize motifs in this circus, they are all familiar – clowns, cages, whistles, storytellers, animals, familiar geometries, textures, visual illusions. The possible renders the impossible. Laughter becomes an opera. The absurd borrows from the everyday to present the circus mind. As the city walks on a tightrope, we intend to present the circus as scaffolding where stories, ideas, desire are suspended in disbelief.
An imaginarium will be inaugurated in the city. We will mark the city with playful sensuous experiments. An imaginarium will be inaugurated in the city. It is not fixed, it is ephemeral. Yet, it is always present. The circus will unfold inside this imaginarium. Artists from different disciplines will participate and try different things to create surprises, spectacles, distortions, illusions.The city in all its avatars, falls and gets up each day. To not miss the humour, to register failures, to resist, to awaken, to find new ways we see, for new ideas the circus must come alive. We will build the circus and leave you to experience and speculate.