Elena Bernardini in dialogue with Raqs Media Collective
Printed in Cinema of Prayoga: Indian Experimental Film & Video, 1913-2006, ed. Brad Butler + Karen Mirza, A no.w.here Publication, London, 2006

This interview with Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta) is an abridged version of two conversations which took place on the 17th and 22nd Dec 2005 in Delhi during one of my recent visits to India for an ongoing research on video/installation art from India.- Elena Bernardini EB: I'd like to ask you about 'translocality'. In which way the term may help to frame a certain engagement with the world around us and more specifically your work? SS: A lot of our work is very rooted in terms of its context in Delhi which is where we work. In a sense we have always seen our work as responding to the city. So, even if it articulates across large cultural distances we have always seen it as an ongoing process of responding to the locality that we live in. It's a way of looking at the world from here. Even when we have worked in other spaces, for example we did a fairly major project in Brussels; it was from the point of view of being someone who is located in a city like Delhi. JB: We are interested in the urban landscape, not to draw comparisons with urban locations elsewhere but to see the kind of transformations, the kind of urban forms that are emerging, and the geographies these entail. So, we feel the need to look at the urban landscape in a broader post-national framework. We would read translocality as a way of relating to other locations through certain practices whether they are techno-culture practices or whether they are urban transformative practices. MN: For us the idea of the urban in a sense is a mnemonic for being; it is a base register in which one can think about ways of being, and of creative engagement. And technology is obviously a part of that fabric. When you are immersed in a certain register it is important to reflect upon that. As Jeebesh was saying, it is important to try to understand how it is now , not in order to draw comparisons with other realities. It's not a matter of trying to find ‘this is this' and ‘this is in common with that'. It's just that practices emerge from certain contexts and these contexts have cultural specificities but they also have simultaneous ways of being in many places. So that's what our curiosity is about. JB: Just few minutes back, she was reading a mail from Morocco… MN: Yes, a friend of mine was just in Morocco and wrote to me that there they take Hollywood films and re-edit them using the same footage to make a shorter film dubbed in Arabic. So, it becomes a whole new story without shooting anew. It's taking all the existing cultural material and re-writing it. This is the kind of engagement I am talking about; it is looking at, taking cultural material which exists globally, and transforming it using technologies. It's being reflexive, it's happening everywhere. JB: It is a transformation of global material. To frame this kind of exchange we require a new conceptual tool, and ‘translocality' can be a starting point to look and understand these kinds of practices. And I think that most of our urban experience is continuously at the edge of these types of formations. [---] EB: I think we have tackled the question of translocality in a different way from where we had started with you, Shuddha. Jeebesh focused more on the importance of being in a city, of the fact that your work is urban-based and how that opens up a discourse which translocality can help framing. Would you like to add something to what has been said up till now? SS: One concern in our work has always been to look at different kinds of connections and connectivity in time and space. We are constantly looking at the history of the moment in which we are in now. So, how did we come to be this way, in this city? How did the world come to be this way? If you begin asking these questions, you have to make lateral moves in time – in terms of looking at the past, but also in terms of resonances and echoes in the present. So, this orienting oneself constantly in this direction makes us look at flows and networks and the evolution of practices, or maybe evolution is not the right word, but at least at the ways in which practices get layered in history. So, we look at things as a kind of palimpsest. If you look at the walls in Delhi, they have layers and layers of posters and that is one way of looking at the way the present has arisen, to look at it in terms of a torn set of posters that stick on to each other. And also another way is to look at the traces of things. Again if you look at the streets of Delhi many signs leave their traces as they rub past the surface of the city. It is possible to think of cities in a similar way, or spaces at large in a similar way; spaces leave their imprint. If you think of each city being a particular entity with large footprints, then, these footprints are often sort of merging into each other in global space. And traces travel or infect each other. In this sense translocality is also to observe the world in the space that you are in and to see your traces spread across and other traces entering the space that you currently find yourself in. So, it is not a matter of situating oneself in some kind of abstract ether where everything is floating; it is actually to consider the place you are in with great concreteness and specificity. That is one of the things I think we should talk about in terms of translocality. JB: Usually city spaces are contextualized within ‘the national'. I think now is the time in which we have to consider post-national ways of looking at space, not just in terms of different comparative national registers which mark out cultural and formal differences but more in terms of the kind of texture that joins, gets disrupted, and gets torn. So, these types of relationships are more important. SS: and these networks can stretch in many directions. They may stretch from a city like Delhi to a city in some other country. (…) Delhi can be viewed as a node in a network that begins or has one point of origin in one very small town in north India and may spread to some other parts of the world. Things may be travelling back and forward across this matrix, so it is good to think of cities in this kind of way… JB: as ‘meshworks'--- SS: yes, rather than bounded entities. And a lot of our projects, our research process or what has ended up as specific art projects are continuous articulations of an investigation of this kind. [---] E: I'd like to ask you a bit more about The Wherehouse , the project you did in Brussels as in a way it tells a lot about your relationship to place and ideas of mobility we have discussed up till now. How was it articulated? SS: There were two sets of objects. There were objects that were found in the streets of Brussels arranged as in an archaeological dig. So, it was to treat Brussels as if it were an archaeological site, as an abandoned site. And then, there were objects which could notionally have been abandoned in the form of pictures in a book which we distributed in a detention centre and at the exhibition. JB: two kind of abandonment were brought in relation to each other: one through the pictures in the book and speech, text and one through the form of an archaeological dig and the exercise of archaeological naming. [---] The work was about Brussels [---]. That's why it was called The Wherehouse ; it was Brussels as ‘a wherehouse', as a place where objects and memories can be retold. If you want to talk about Brussels, you cannot talk as if the relationship between objects and memories were very stable. That was the work. It was not about refugees' voice though it was read by a lot of people that way. It was not so. The objects were from the streets of Brussels, and were brought in relation to another set of objects (the pictures, the text in it) which were supposed to upset the stability of the relation between the city, Brussels, and its material world. SS: which in its reception it's actually a very interesting paradox. It is very difficult for someone who locates itself within the stability of contemporary Europe to consider the material reality of their city as being abandoned. We were trying to actually... EB: reverse that… SS: precisely--- [---] EB: can you talk more about your interaction with the refugees at the detention centre? JB: We were in the detention centre, visiting everyday, for 2 weeks. We realized that, in such a short time, the only way we could make something out of our presence there was to have some kind of mediation. And we thought about making a book to give as a gift. There was no compulsion to take it, keep it, return it or not return it. Some people returned it very beautifully. Some people kept it. It was a nice, soft interaction. There was no hardness to it. The observations in the books weren't stories as such. They were strange, sharp, insightful, at times very banal observational notations. There was no story of ‘my travels' or ‘what happened to me' kind of thing, neither of abandonment actually. The stories were very sharply about remembering material texture – as were the pictures in the book – like a cup of tea or an umbrella that doesn't open. It was very moving. I don't know what the status of this form of knowledge is. Maybe over a period of time people will engage with it further. We distributed the books also in the exhibition, for people to pick up and take. In this way the viewer also became part of it. The viewer was not external to it. EB: In this way one can also understand the process behind it... JB: and the simplicity of the process. You could come and pick it up. And people did pick the book up, so many. Materials like this travel. Some get intrigued, some don't, some write, some don't, some write and keep it to themselves, some write and share and give it to you thinking that you might do something with it. None of the text had a plea or anything. It was very sharp, sometimes angry, sometimes very poetic, very withdrawn, and sometimes very esoteric. [---] EB: Going back to the issue regarding the reception of the work. I think sometimes in art criticism there's an obsession with statements... JB: Statements, politics, methodology, ideas of authentic position. Contaminations of any kind are a threat. Our curatorial invitation was to reflect on Brussels and to produce a work that reflects on the city. They invited us to do that because a lot of our writings presents this tension about how to engender a global conversation, how people from different parts can engage with each other, and with each other materials without being a one way type of interaction. Both Barbara and Dirk (1) were interested in that dialogue and invited us. We asked for a couple of weeks in the detention centre to see what we could make out of it. [---] I think for some people the work suffered the problem of veracity. Is it methodologically sound? Are these voices believable? This is what I would call the veracity problem. It was a very opening out experience for us. It changed a lot the way we worked after that. EB: in which way? JB: The biggest challenge for us has been to find ways in which to work with the documentary image, the image, and not so much the documentary narrative. [---] This has been our engagement from day one. Because we come from documentary film background, installations provided us an entry point into rethinking the documentary image in a new context and helped us to move away from the narrative construction of the linear documentary, towards a more fragmentary one and at some level a more active relationship with the viewer. In 5 Pieces of Evidence we used documentary materials but the preoccupation was also to connect them together using an architectural form and then, tell a story through both. In The Wherehouse , instead, it was the first time in which we got interested in the voice, the relationship between the documentary image, objects, how objects appear in different forms, and the voice. What happened after that? I think our relationship to the documentary image now is mediated also through performance. We are trying to rework documentary material through performance or performative modes in order to bring a more historical framework into it. In The Impostor in the Waiting Room we were trying to do that. We were trying to keep the material we had away from this question of veracity and representation, towards a space of a more shifting nature: how that material gives away shifting ideas of history, how one can look into these narratives, how one can look into this material itself. This and the interest in the voice was broadly the shift. SS: The voice is coming a lot into our work now. We had earlier works where we had used the voice like A/S/L Age/Sex/Location or even Location (n) , where we use the kind of voice that is in the static, the air, telephonic conversations, interceptions, and so on. Now we have moved from that to actually the spoken text itself as an element in the work and we'll see where it will go from there... JB: The voice will be mediated by more performative ways. In The Wherehouse there were some forms of mediation – the archaeological dig, the book. Now we are looking at other forms of mediation which use performance, through our narration of the encounter rather than keeping this mediation distant. EB: The way you are taking up the documentary image is to break that fictionality which is part of documentary material but which is a lot of times taken for granted, of course, not by you who are into film making and know the code of this fictionality and how you build it. I'm thinking more in terms of the viewers. By breaking the narrative, you are working through juxtapositions using more the raw image. There is so much research that goes behind a work like yours and when you see it, you get this very complex image. I wonder if all the work that's behind might not get lost to a viewer who is so used of getting the impression and soon move away. Perhaps this remark of mine is not really fair to your work as your work often actually does generate the time, the frame for the encounter to happen by building a set of different activities which engage the viewer… SS: Your question has two parts – one is about the shift from documentary film to contemporary art. Actually thinking about veracity, evidence, truth, representation in contemporary documentary practice globally, not just in one location, is generally quite sophisticated. Documentary film makers – at least those that are working at the edge of their practice – have a much more complex and nuanced view of documentary material than the way in which documentary material often gets presented in contemporary art contexts. When people coming from visual arts begin to use documentary material they take at times the documentary image very much at its face value. It's the very fact of the recorded image and its ‘recordedness' which becomes very important whereas in documentary film practice this is something we have passed through. I think that when we bring in the documentary image, the documentary voice or the document into contemporary art practice – and there are others like us – we try to complicate this somewhat innocent view of truth that sometimes we find in contemporary art because we are coming from the other end. And that's linked to your second question. There is a body of work which is quite thick – the images are thick, there are many layers, attachments to it. I think it is quite ok for the viewers to take just a slice of what we are offering them and leave. Of course, if they spent one and a half hours they would leave with many more things… I think we are beginning to work now with the idea of the surfer, the person who surfs through the work as well as of the person who chooses to spend a longer time. And there are hidden rewards if you choose to stay. I think some things also unravel between works. So it is possible for a viewer or a visitor to actually begin to make sense of something once they have seen not one but more than one work because there are passages and connections, corridors between the works. [---] JB: Regarding what you are saying – the issue of whether the thinking that goes behind making that image or that kind of juxtaposition – is retained or lost in the work, I think that over a period of time in the next few years we will be moving towards a more ‘archival image'. A lot of these works like The Wherehouse or The Impostor in the Waiting Room have an archival imagination. We are interested in working out an archival imagination in a situation-context. This kind of methodology of thinking may allow to bring out the process of layering more accurately, more on the surface. [---] What we are trying to work on is how you can bring the archive into the installation without sounding like we are actually going through an archive; we need to have always a strong image composition so that the processes of making sense between two materials, two sets or clusters of materials can open up to the viewer engaging with the work. That will take some time. The problem is posed for us. We have interesting stories, interesting narratives, archives and we have accessed interesting documents, but we are also interested in the pure image rendition, the image itself excites us. (1) Barbara Vanderlinden and Dirk Snauwert, curators, invited Raqs Media Collective to participate in the series Revolution/Restoration. The Wherehouse was created for this occasion and presented at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, in Brussels, in 2004.

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