"Rarely Asked Questions"
Emmy Firmin, DAM - a magazine of Contemporary Culture, No.13, September-October, 2007

One of the most exciting groups to come out of India is Raqs Media Collective, which fittingly can be an acronym for 'Rarely Asked Questions'. The questions its work raises might not be the most obvious ones, but it's not just a matter of skimming the surface when it comes to the subject... The collective operates in a range of media in its engagement and investigation of urban spaces and global circuits taking in image, sound, software, objects, performance, print, text and curatorial projects. Experiencing its work is like a headlong rush into modern life, with fragments of contemplation rising up through the energy. There's nothing mindlessly chaotic about it, any confusion is considered and the results can b both intimate and all consuming in an edgy sense of the contemporary. And while the idea of collective or network can be empty gestures in the hands of some, for Raqs it is one of the cornerstones of its work.

Raqs's work speaks of an experience which cannot be circumscribed to a strictly local level. Neither can it be inscribed within a homogenous type of global cultural formation, though the reach of their activity is undobtedly global. The dimensions 'local' and 'global' with reference to the works of practitioners like Raqs becomes inevitably 'enmeshed' with one another. Raqs's practice speaks of both mobility across and between locations and locatedness without setting one against the other, or privileging one above the other.

If nomadism remains one decisive element in Raqs’s conception of the world, their work is also characterised by the theme of irreducible mystery, which also originates, no doubt, in the will to disrupt the presuppositions of modernity. While the “conspiracy theory” is the pre-eminent narrative mode for the contradictions and transformations wracking the contemporary world, the resort most favoured by Raqs is a kind of “encrypting”. ...Very often, the images with which Raqs works take the form of rebuses, of puzzles encoding a process of thought. .. It creates a surface over which one can wander, but which can not necessarily be penetrated. Raqs’s work does not seek to render situations explicit but prefers rather to stay at a more indefinable level where there does not appear to be any possible narrative. In the same way, the work’s spatial organisation – notably the use of multiple screens – breaks the constraints of linear narrative by separating and de-synchronizing the various elements that make up the mystery. This is also a way of disrupting a teleological rhetoric in favour of what Raqs calls an "unresolved poetics".

These strategies presuppose an approach to the visual that is more argumentative than narrative, oscillating constantly between poetry and discourse, playfulness and gravity, fiction and documentary, whose references to the experiments of Chris Marker or the essay-films of Harun Farocki are evident. In Raqs’s work, images acquire the status of aphorisms or epigrams, of highly concentrated, precise renditions of individual thoughts about the world: "We like to think that practice is theory realized in the world of objects, processes and affects, and that theory is just practice in conversation with itself (Raqs)". Images are not treated as objects of knowledge, but rather as tools for knowledge, rather as in Walter Benjamin’s aspiration to "write" history with and through images.In other words, theory itself here becomes a visual practice.

Forms of Conveyance: Collegial Reflections on the Raqs Media Collective
Ranjit Hoskote, Impostor in the Waiting Room, Bose Pacia Monograph Series, New York 2004

Raqs is, as I have observed earlier, collegial in its operations. Its members invite others to participate in the improvisational platforms or social projects that they initiate; but they neither constrain themselves within a domineering auteur-dirigiste role, nor do they lock themselves into a single way of making art or intervening in the politics of everyday life. If they regard the world as an anthology, and base a number of their interventions on this principle, it is not from an encyclopaedist’s ambition to contain the whole of human knowledge in a volume – but rather, as a homage to the acts of sign-making and meaning-making, which they cherish as a record of the poetics by which human beings mark their presence, activity and the small histories of insight that add up to a larger landscape of endeavour. Thus, Raqs prizes the elliptical and the epigrammatic, the ephemeral and the oblique, the asides of daily life: for all these there is space in the archival consciousness that underpins the workings of Raqs. Like the alaya-vijnana of Yogachara Buddhist thought, this is the treasure-house of images, impulses and potentialities from which Raqs operates.

And yet, secrecy plays as important a role as sociality does, in the workings of Raqs. I would suggest that the emphasis on secrecy, passage by impersonation, versatility of form, and the multiple readabilities of the signal – which are central motifs in the work of Raqs – may be viewed under two different aspects. At one level, these are the gestures by which their chosen figures of reference, the refugee and the illegal migrant and the marginal artisan, conduct the mobilities of living. At another level, these gestures also speak, do they not, of privacies encoded into the work of art as traces of autobiography?

As a figure or trope, the nomad signifies the transgressive and emancipatory gesture. The nomad position is a threat to established order, since it rejects borders, passports, the claims of nations, the ordinances of states and the doctrines of academies. It shifts base constantly; the zones it occupies are transient. This, precisely, produces an ambivalence, so far as the radical politics of the collective good is concerned. To be a nomad is to be free of an audience; an art-work that carries its own special charge will invent its own public. To this extent, we must accept that the transgressive and emancipatory gesture of nomadism could involve the assertion of idiosyncrasy and solitude, and the corresponding death of community and locality.

By an intriguing duality, the same gestures of solidarity that Raqs enacts may also signify a deep impulse towards the cryptic, the hermetic, the not-easily-shared, the not-publicly-revealed. I would suggest that Raqs is aware of this dual pressure, and that its emphasis on doubleness in its textual and installation practices may be read as an expression of the freedom not to belong to a constituted whole, as an anarchist insistence on retaining the autonomy of a republic of three. This is not the gesture of the closed circle that implodes upon itself, but rather, a gesture signalising the archetypal inner circle from which all ripple effects must emanate. For this reason, it compels our respect.

On "They Called it the XXth Century (from The Impostor in the Waiting Room)"
Christine Peters

"All displaced persons, exiles, deportees, refugees, deracinated, nomads have in common two sighs, two poignant memories: their dead and their language” .

This citation, taken from Derrida's book "Of Hospitality" was one starting point my reflections on performance for the Theater der Welt programme.

The Impostor in the Waiting Room by Raqs Media Collective, their figure of the trickster is one of a witty surviver, and a disguised nomad, who is "capable of altering an angle of perception, or a trajectory of thought capable of reconfiguring normative discourses. He performs the roles of thief, shape-shifter, agent provocateur or liar - a liar more in the sense of how Oscar Wilde defined him = as one who uses his imagination". 1

The waiting room - or, as Raqs Media Collective put it = "the antechamber to modernity, consisting of small enclaves that subsist in the shadow of the edifices of legality" - is not a space of hospitality at all, but one of indifference, a mute zone, a temporary, transitory, provisional and fleeting space which not only demands flexibility but also the strength & capacity to re-structure and re-collect memory and to re-invent identity, a space in which one is dependent on chance.

The Impostor in the Waiting Room is about the dreams of shadow existences in disguise, about waiting and biding time. There is no such thing as "wasting" time, because there is nothing else to do anyway. Because Godot might show up very soon. And if not, maybe next day and then finally, "real life" will start, dreams will become true. -

If we look back to Homer's Odyssee as a classical example for a nomadic art of storytelling and combine it with the Impostor or trickster subject as a performed narrative that does not offer an explanation, but allows the listener / watcher to reflect upon its meaning, we get close to the very nature of performance itself:

In search of the wandering minstrel that fills the memories of humankind, we find in performance today nomadic existences that tell of pain, rage, mourning, confusion, infatuation, affection, love – in short, of feelings – and turn these into compelling events.

Perhaps this is precisely why such terms as “living archive” or “collective memory” are so tenacious.
Performance as a transitory medium refers to the age-old theatre question of meaning and non-meaning, permanence and transience, life and death, place and utopia, standstill and movement, confirmation and questioning, affirmation and experience.

It is the ideally permeable vehicle and store for an emotional and intellectual state that is inherent in art – as a form of potential, as a utopia, as a dream.

Concerning the pieces I've seen before by Raqs Media Collective I was both emotionally touched and intellectually challenged - their storytelling and text writing is both poetic and theoretically exquisite, their ressources politically fuelled and their works show an elaborate state of social and artistic responsibility. Moreover, what I especially like in their work is, that they smash back responsibility to the viewer and reader by challenging his/her imagination.

Or - and to finish with - as Walter Benjamin says "Actually it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it...It is left up to (the reader) to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks."2
"Things left behind, when found, unravel. Memories travel. Inscriptions survive"
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1 From the essay "Embodied subversion" by Jean Fisher, in: Live Art and Performance, Tate Modern, 2004
2 Walter Benjamin, "The storyteller", Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, NY, 1968, p.89

"On Rescension"
Steve Dietz, in Anthology of Art

...Within months - virtually simultaneously on certain time scales - Raqs Media Collective, Delhi, coins the term "rescension" and the New York Times writes about "mash-ups" - songs that "typically match the rhythm, melody and underlying spirit of the instrumentals of one song with the a cappella vocals of another."