Arrachal León, good afternoon. Thanks for joining us. We have the chance to be here with this conversation between Manuel Sirauki, Kojo Shun and Angelic Sadar, the two founders of the Otholiv, who are the authors of the work that we have today and at the vista of all our participants in the museum, Horizonte O. As you know, the program of the museum is a line of programming of this museum from now on, in this space. Manuel is the director of that program.
This year, immediately before this work, we received a Monira al-Kadiri, IV Sagrado, which has a point of connection with this work, as we now know, which is its preoccupation for nature, the perception of the urgency of our responsibility in the conservation of the planet. In this case, the work that we present today is a work that Doug Rieckitt made in 2018. They also have their 10th anniversary this year, which is a year 2002. We celebrate their 10th anniversary of the year 2025.
It is a work that, as they will tell you, that gira around that project, which is done by Tabindana Tagore, now a little more than a century, 1921, in India, in San Pinniketan, a project from that university, the Viva of Isha Marathi. I think that this project is an example, a metaphor and a reflection of the past 100 years about the implications of the individuals who are now, which also allows us to connect with our past, but also to look at the future. So, thanks to Manuel, to Angelique, to Cosmo for being here with us and I hope that we are
here with you. Very good, good afternoon everyone. I'm going to change English and if you have any difficulties with English, I invite you to arm yourself from one of these translation devices that are at the entrance. And if you have trouble with Spanish, this will be in English, but when we speak in Spanish where translation devices can be used. So hi, everyone, and thank you for being here. I'm really happy and honored. We are honored at the museum to have the Autolite Group,
Angelina and Kojo, presenting O Horizon, which is a film installation, but it's also framework for research which includes conversations, archival research, collaborations, multiple media such as photography, drawing and painting if we consider Pidia Segar's drawings as part of Over Horizon which I think is implied in the presentation at the Film and Video Gallery and certainly there is this stage for viewing the work which is intrinsically associated with what it conveys which is this idea of
tree schooling that was launched and promoted by Ravindranath Tagore alongside his foundation of visual art in Shantini Ketan. The idea of this conversation is to produce some more knowledge on this work, which I feel is very important. The work dates from 2018 and that's when I first encountered it at Hauser Kulturen der Welt, where I imagine it was first presented as part of the Bauhaus Imaginista project. I have to say I was shocked in an uplifting way.
I was familiar with your incredibly critical work, also highly speculative, and when I saw this piece it felt that the whole dystopian energy was also turned into a form of hope, maybe otherworldly hope or a hope to terraform the present with that material that was at the same time Tago's future and not our present or not yet. Something that had to do with forming the present with that matter, with that material that was somehow scattered and you were gathering bits and pieces through your work, through your film. So I would like to simply launch the conversation
by seeing the teaser. But before we do that, yeah, maybe you want to say some introduction to this message of the forest that we will see. Thank you, Manuel, for your comments, for inviting us. And thank you to the Guggenheim for inviting us to show and to present with the Osaga's work, Overizon and Shantimikatin Studies. So we're going to begin, I think, by showing Message to the Forest, which was commissioned by Friese Art Fair a few years ago, 2020, I think. We decided to make a three minute film. We were commissioned this for a three minute film.
And we basically thought, well, let's use this chance to have to actually present Tagore's voice, Rabindranath Tagore, whose work, whose institution, school, university, this overriding is kind of centered on, we don't actually present him. We don't present him. We don't have any photos of him. We don't have his voice. It is not a hagiography of Tagore. it is a work which is studying chantinacation in various different forms but Message to the Forest is actually a
three minute work where Tagore's voice features Tagore went all over the world actually to raise money for his school when it first opened in the early 20th century and he gave talks where he would earn $700 or whatever. He'd be invited into salons like in Boston and in Oxford and in Cambridge and various places and he would give these talks on, you know, Pan-Asianism or on kind of the threat of mechanical method, as he put it, in relation to the colonial influence and enclosure.
He would talk a lot about, yes, the, yeah, he would kind of, he would give these kind of invocations or incantations or evoke, he would evoke the kind of beauty and splendor of nature, let's say. I think this was given in Berlin, actually, this speech in 1918 or something. So you hear this very crackly, Turgorean, wistful poem to the forest. Nice. Shall we see it? And then we continue with the conversation. Yeah. Let's see the first one, please.
sacred and towns as places of intimate. All spots which display a special beauty of Rengar of nature. The Himalayas of India are sacred and the Vindyashu. Our majestic rivers are sacred. Lake Manaka and the confluence of the dangers of the Jumina are sacred. India has saturated with our voice and worship, the great nature with regard to the earth surrounded, whose light flows their eyes is blackened, and whose water flows to stand, whose food gives them light, and from whose magic is literary,
Some false constant declaration of the infinite in music, sense and color, bringing everything to their soul. India gains the world as true as it's true communion of souls. The idea of freedom to which India aspired was based upon the realization of spiritual unity. It is India's duty to be loyal to this great truth and never allow it to be extinguished by this storm of pattern sweeping over the present day world. That is why we must be careful today to try to find out the principles
by means of which India will be able for certain to realize themselves. That principle is neither commercialism nor nationalism. It is not merely self-determination, but self-conflict and self-dedication. The voice of this voice was heard in India's forest of old, above the dim of race conflict. It was declared into Phoenicia and expounded into Peter. Lord Buddha renounced the world that he might make this just a household word for all mankind. The real namath and other great spirits of India continue to proclaim its message.
India's grand achievement, which is still for peace within her heart, is waving to unite in Israel, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Christian, not by thought, not by the apathy of this nation, but in the harmony of the past and co-operation. Thank you.
you split right um Kodja, maybe you can tell us a bit more about this intention in spreading this whole terraforming message from Tagore and how it reaches the present and the future and the futuristic reading of Tagore that you guys have made. I mean, thank you, first of all, for your introduction.
Thanks to everybody for joining us. It's a pleasure to be here in Bilbao. And, you know, I think when we look at Shanti Mkhaitan, we take into consideration that this was a very unique moment in time. to say that the Modi regime, the BJP, was in power, but it hadn't yet taken hold of the administration of Shantin Ketan. And you were from it. Yeah. So that means the kind of the BJP regime with their Hindu fundamentalist ideology had not
yet captured the senior management and administration of the university. So that meant we were able to enter into the space after a number of years of negotiation and we were able to return a number of times. We had the kind of fortuitous luck to be able to spend extended periods of time and to make contact with many different students and lecturers right across many different faculties. So what you see, for those of you who haven't seen Over Icon yet, and I hope you spend some
time with Over Icon, what you see is a kind of portrait of the moods. It's what we call a study of study, study of the different kinds of study, different modes and practices, performances that pertain to Vishwa Bharati, depending on your field of study, depending on which students are studying what. But, you know, when you go there, it's a functioning university, which means it's full of undergraduates doing their thing, hanging out, wasting time, heading to lectures or seminars. So what we've created has a certain condensed
structure of temporal experience to it, which is much more concentrated than the diffused temporality of a campus in which many students are moving on many different timelines at the same time. And maybe the way we try to invite people into this is to invite the acting vice chancellor. So the woman who really made it possible for us to do this project, she really is one of the first voices you hear in O'Horizon. and she's narrating a poem by Tagore from 1896, which is the year 1400 in the Bengali calendar.
And in this poem, Tagore imagines a poet writing a poem to a reader a hundred years in the future. So that's somebody reading the poem in 1996, looking back on 1896. And from this look to the future, this reader from 1996 is trying to imagine Tagore's reading in 1896. So this, let's call it this intertemporal structure, this double structure of time, provided us with a kind of temporal frame within which to insert ourselves.
One way to think of the project is as not so much an experience in transnational aesthetics, although it clearly is that, but as an experience in what Koblen Mercer calls translational aesthetics. There is a relation between the translational and the transnational. And so through our translation of Tagore's poem, we try to set up a kind of intertemporal movement through the time space of the campus. there are many ways to think about the kind of the temporal structuring of experience
that the video sets up so Anjali maybe you want to say a bit more about the kinds of experiences of time that the video is inviting audiences to take up yeah I mean it's a long story I think of Tagore Ravindranath Tagore and the family of Tagore with all their faults all their kind of faults as men and upper class men what we can you know what we know happens when forms of patriarchy have forms of power
within that context it is important to recognize what they also brought to Bengal in relation to art and culture from their family home, Jorashanko Inn, Calcutta, which was a centre of art and music and theatre and dance and a gallery and a stage and many different things kind of went on there. You can still visit the house with the archive. It's still very much there. Why Calcutta, one has to think. Calcutta was the first port of entry of the East India Company as it started robbing countries around the world
and creating the kind of maritime piracy network, which then became one of the most powerful corporations on the planet. When one thinks of Calcutta, one also thinks of the kind of creation of a city an imperial port and how that imperial port was produced as a form of occupation but as transnational forms of trade based on transactions it's an interesting very interesting place Calcutta because still now it is capital of Bengal it still now holds the longest resistance to Modi and Hindu fundamentalism, they still kind of resist,
like Kerala, the Modi, the BJP kind of occupation of India. But let's go back to the British occupation. You know, when India becomes part of the realm, when, you know, of the British was, you know, how that happened is also a long story to do with India's First War of Independence, which was very much a violent war, a fight against British occupation by the very army that the East India Company had created. This wonderful war of independence was quashed by Victoria and her armies and they killed, the British killed 10 to 15 million people and India then became part of the realm.
A hundred years later, India wins its independence. But what happens also in that hundred years is that the kind of Bengal renaissance happens. And I think it is very interesting to think about, like, the idea of India as a nation, as a kind of state emerging, you know, as part of becoming independent. And what I think the Tagore family was thinking about what Tagore was thinking about, because Tagore was not necessarily flying a flag of nationalism at all. He was a transnational figure. He was interested in Pan-Asianism. You know, he was actually, I think, you know, interested without putting words in, I mean,
I think he was grappling with this idea of a pre-colonial presence, meaning from the tapavan, the forest school, the idea of education in India pre the colony was one where the sciences and arts were studied in tandem, where the infrastructure of movement from within Asia was complicated. I mean, I think one can expect, one can think about the world in a way that is complex, which actually predates even, I would say, well, even what we are going through now, which is a kind of, say,
the closing down of the freedom of movement in many ways. But let's think about what was suggested by Pan-Asianism or Eurasianism or Euro-Africanism or the idea of movement. You know, I think what one can think about is a far-flung network of societies, you know. And as, you know, David Graeber and Michael Wengrove talk in their new book, The Dawn of Everything, and I'm going to quote from this, they talk about, you know, the spanning diverse ecologies with people, plants, animals, drugs, objects of value, songs and ideas, moving between them in endlessly intricate ways, how we can move between them in endlessly intricate ways. Well, you know, he talks in this new book, The Dawn of Everything,
he describes this as the simple logical outcome for our first freedom. This is our right to move away from one's home, knowing that one will be received and cared for, valued in some distance space, invited into a complex space of care where you will learn about different foods, different ontologies of thinking, different forms of art, different forms of culture, in-depth forms of culture. this is really our inheritance on this planet and you know this is I think what Tagore was trying to create in Shantimiketan he was trying to he was looking at the fact that the sensations the senses
had literally been deprived by the violence of occupation of India of the subcontinent and he was thinking about how he can create a sensory environment like a school which could embody a kind of full sensory environment in ancient some philosophy in the in South Asia in the Hindu texts you know there is a nothing to do with him the fundamentalism there is a there's a there are 18 senses in fact they actually they kind of for example the touch touches one's sense but it's attached to their hand as a tool what does that mean?
it means labour, it means an awareness of one's own production of labour perhaps Marx talks a lot about the senses as our theoreticians you know Karl Marx so I think we became very interested in Hagool's school because there he was, you know, actually, yes, he was producing a kind of ecology of thinking with people, with plants, with animals, with, not sure about drugs, but certainly with objects, meaning that he brought, some of his students went all over Asia to Japan or to, within India, and they brought votive objects back to Shantina painting,
to the Kalabavan, to the school that was created. And students would study these objects. To think about the ontology of the object, even as it moved from, say, the no-mask, moved from Japan to Shantimakaten itself. So I think what Togol was trying to put in place was a coalitional space, as opposed to this kind of mediated lesser evil of the creation of the state. I think we are back at that. Points now of world-making after apocalypse. How are we going to deal or bridge this kind of apocalypse? Thank you both for these two introductions,
which I think situate the viewing of O Horizon already quite clearly. I get from what you say, Anjali, that there is a regenerative project in this pedagogy of earth, which is at the core of Shantiniketan. But I also gather in your connection with the futuristic, let's say, poem of Tagolo, which is written in 1896, which is prior to the foundation of Saint-Niccident, you are collaging these two moments in Tagore's career. There's the projection in the poem, and there is the development of this incredible project
as a university of the arts. Collaging these two things has a sense, which is that... Okay, this might be my interpretation, but so be it. Today we can see they converge as a possibility for us to regenerate also from what we have been at the same time doing and suffering, doing to the earth and inflicting to our own species and other species that have to bear our presence and our destruction on earth. So if we have to undertake this regeneration of earth, Shantiniketan is an example, but it's not a retrospective example, it's not something
nice that happened in the 20s or in the 1910s, but rather it's a project that can be pursued and can even be expanded universally. So the futuristic ecological thinking of Tagore also converges with his universalism in Shantiniketan. Now I would like to ask you both to speak a little bit more about this pedagogy of Earth and how you see that is practiced today in a place like this. And particularly, I would like to ask you about how art has become or has remained a driving force in all forms of learning in Shantiniketan, because this is what you see in the horizon,
that art is the sort of energy that goes through life, agriculture, education. Yeah, what you see in O Horizon is actually two universities. You see Shantiniketan, set up in the 1920s. You see a second university, Shriniketan, set up in the 1940s. Shriniketan is more devoted to different kinds of agricultural sciences. And so in a way, this distinction between Shantiniketan as this university of the arts, in which in some ways the entire campus is a kind of museum of the arts. Tagore recruited some of the greatest modernists
of the 20th century, artists who were simultaneously philosophers, theorists such as Keiji Subramanian, the Nood Bahari Mukherjee, Nandalaubos. These figures, they built the curriculum and they also, in a way, staged their own thinking about the role of art within the campus itself, through murals, through statues and sculptures, statues and sculptures, through paintings, so that as you move through the campus, you begin to realise that the campus is something like an open-air exhibition in which you can
visit different moments in the 20th century, different aesthetic proposals about the role of art in its relation to education and to life. And precisely because Shantini Ketun has this epic, you know, it has this epic status, Satyajit Ray went there. It's really an epic place and Tagore is a figure, one of these world historical figures like Goethe or Shakespeare or something. He's really the first Indian thinker to win the Nobel Prize. The man whose poems, whose lyrics serve as the basis for the Bangladesh National Anthem.
I mean, he's just like a world historical figure. So as Anjali says, it wasn't possible for us to do a biography of the university or a hagiography of Tagore. or even the history of either the figure or the university. So it's something much more modest. But I think what happened was we realised that there was... What had grown up was a kind of distinction, that Shantinikatin is the world of the arts, and Shrinikatin is the world of the sciences. But the longer we spent in both senses, in both campuses, the longer we spent in both campuses moving backwards and forwards between both, we began to think of an ecology that cuts across this distinction,
that both Shantiniketan and Shriniketan are engaged in an ecology of the earth, which requires both the arts and the sciences. We began to understand that Tagore and his team of interlocutors had in a way terraformed Shantinikaten. They designed it. They conceived of it from the ground up. They brought soil from different rivers in Bengal. They brought different plants, different flowers and different trees. and they located them in special places, knowing that they would outlive them.
Tagore had created special festivals for growing and planting trees and flowers. He'd created the lyrics for the songs. Seasons. Yeah, for the dances, for the seasons in which these kinds of plantings and growings and harvestings would take place. So he tried to create a kind of, he tried to create a means through which these kinds of structures could socially reproduce themselves over time. He tried to create what we would now call an aesthetic sociality, like a form of life based around these practices that would survive him and that could be continued at different scales.
when you put that together with with with the investigations into the health of the soil that we encountered in srinikhetan the study of the kind of attrition of the soil like the way the weather and the rain and the wind beats down on the soil where the soil is in is engaged in a kind of constant battle with the elements and needs constant renewing and constant care, we began to read the two as not arts versus sciences, but as one set of ecological practices that require a kind of way of thinking about video, a way of thinking about moving image, which
aspires to be as ecological as what it is we were encountering. So we would ask ourselves the question of what does it mean to shoot a video in which the soil is as important as the people who walk upon it? What does it mean to shoot a tree, to frame a tree, to film a tree, to record a tree, so that the tree is not the background to the students in the foreground, which is kind of our habit of viewing. So how would you suspend that habit in which humans automatically gain ascendance over the soil below them and the trees behind them
and the plants next to them and the trees above them? How would you suspend that hierarchy that film has itself trained us into perceiving? And so these were the questions we began to ask ourselves. You know, whether we succeeded or not is an open question, but these are the questions that informed and animated our thinking. And because we were able to keep returning, we were able to continually bring these questions into dialogue and build a kind of interpretive community of people who could help us both to ask this question and to dramatize the question.
Not to resolve it, but to stage it in different ways with different people. I mean the school is there is a where you see the children there is Sriniketan which is a I would say a school that is a science soil agronomy institute but it's also a school for children from the villages where they learn how to work with electrical circuitry where they learn to weave where they learn about the social bandits that fought off the British that they learn about you know there it's an amazing place part of a barn is the children's school in Shantin Keaton it's kind of different place but yes there are these exactly there are these two
sort of environments and I think the you know when Kujo talks about this temporal, this temporal, let's say, leap. I mean, when one, I think we were very much aware that within the context of the Anthropocene, the crimes that have been done to the earth are still remaining. So whatever was done a hundred years ago still remains. May I ask you something? Yeah. In these terms of temporalities and construction of the film, you have spoken, at different times about the improvisational structure of this production. That, in a way, it was built through continuous travel,
but also the idea is that the environment provides a script. And you very much get that sense when you view O Horizon. In a way, it is like a locus. And so how was it in terms of interaction? this improvisational script I guess in its nature is related to the fact that it was also based in constant interaction with people, right? Yes, I mean the I was going to say that the university is not a kind of happy utopian space for learning Tagore's vision is let's say
in many ways been turned into a kind of living museum or into a tourist center within the context of Hindu fundamentalism, which is intolerant, which is violent against Muslims and everyone else. So, you know, the idea of return is not possible and limbo has no end. So I would say right now there is a kind of limbo space. So the students are kind of exhausted, you know, and I think what we saw was the... We talked about hope earlier, but what we saw was like the traces of this hope
in amongst many different practices. And I suppose what we were trying to do was link these traces. But in relation to the improvisational aspect, we created an environment where we stayed for some time and we hosted a number of the members of the faculty who then brought soul scientists and playwrights and dancers so the space that we held was one of welcome we created an environment we found a beautiful house in Chantinokitin and a lot of people
we invited people for dinner drinks and you know and you were filming throughout well we'd invite people and then they'd say would you like to see what we're doing tomorrow we're doing a play so would you like to come and film it we would like, some people would just start singing and then they would like to record this song or come to the dance rehearsals tomorrow or, so it was very much like that, it wasn't like you know we held a space and from within it all these things happened so we would go and shoot the next day yeah so we don't have we don't have scripts what we have is we have locations like we know where we want to shoot and we have
ideas about how we want to shoot like which lenses to use you know handheld or with a so-called gimbal that allows a travel shot or a drone. But we don't know yet. We don't have a fixed idea of who is going to appear in that space. And so these gatherings are about not so much recruiting, but speaking with people and getting a sense of whether they'd like to participate with us. So the improvisation comes at that level. And then what we do is we select sequences from Tagore texts.
And we're not asking people to act. We're asking people to read and discuss. so they don't have to act but they have to kind of tune themselves into the specific text that we've invited them to do and then we film them in these different locations that we pre-selected and then sometimes we just change our mind and add a new location or we reject a location that we've always wanted to do because it's not possible. So the improvisation is happening at the level of which people will dramatize for us. But the locations, which are characters
in themselves. This is what we've spent a lot of time thinking about because it's a question, as I said, of suspending, if possible, this foreground background relation. So this gives the work a kind of free-floating feeling because it's not a narrative as such. If anything, It's based around what we call these kind of temporal structures of experience, you know, which means like you gradually realize that there's somebody on a bicycle crossing like way at the back of the frame. And then you realize there's somebody crossing right at the front.
In between there's a buffalo crossing. And you don't cut while somebody is cycling. You wait till they exit. it. And so these kinds of temporal experiences of walking, cycling, that the pace of a buffalo, the pace of which somebody cycles, these start to set the kind of inter-temporality of what it is we're shooting. And the longer we're there, the more we attune ourselves to these temporal structures and so this is this is kind of what we mean about improvising you have to hold it open enough so that the space itself starts to speak in its different rhythms um and then within that
you know there are particular elements that are we are very keen on um there are some anjali has has her scenes that she's really keen on shooting and has a very strong idea and i have mine and we'll have both of those in so you know uh i'm like it's like we have to have soul science it's so important but but we don't know what the soul scientist will say we're not telling him what to say so when the soul scientist says soul is soul of infinite life and when he talks about O Horizon that's like a gift from him to us because from him O Horizon is the most obvious thing in the world it's just how scientists narrate the different strata of the earth but for
us like as soon as we heard we were like oh my god that's the title yes that's it right there You can hear it. So improvisation, if you set it up, reality itself produces all kinds of special effects and all kinds of coincidences and synchronizations. It's a matter of attention between control and contingency. And you set up some parameters and coordinates. And then you have to let them play out. and don't give up on them if they don't seem to be working out keep going you have to push past your doubts you're like oh god this isn't working no keep going because the camera sees more and
the recorders you know we had two sound recorders each of them are brilliant so they're catching things we can't catch so keep going even when the improvisation seems to be collapsing just keep going keep cooking yeah and so it's amazing i i would assume that the title had come somehow uh diagonally into the project but this is this is a great way to um just point at that exact moment um and i was thinking or perhaps this is something fred motin could have thought of which is that improvisation itself is an ecology and that it is itself simply perhaps and openness to unplanned collaboration and unplanned production on a collective level
from the ecosystem in which you are performing. That's a beautiful way of putting it, yeah. Yeah, I think an improvisation requires preparation. So all of the preparation seems to be wasted because sometimes you think, okay, this just isn't working. But actually you have to stay in the zone of it. and improvisation gives you this courage that the camera is seeing more than you can so even though you have these plans and they seem to be like falling apart in front of your fingertips you have to keep going because um because there's scales and complexity that are beyond what it is you've planned for.
You don't know them yet. You have to return to them via the edit. And this is why a script, a script is not really the point, but quotations and citations are the point because you want to give people, you want to invite them to engage with existing material, but you don't want to script that engagement. You just want to set up the coordinates and then step back from it. So going back to these temporalities, I mean, I'm tempted to say that O Horizon actually is a contemplation of time. Because when you see people in this learning situation that we see here, the tree schooling sort of principles that Tagore brought into Shantiniketen.
well, it's not a wooden table, it's actually a tree, it's not built ground, it is the soil, and so on. So there are multiple layers of time as people learn and build something that is going to be their future self. And so you're looking at time, and the tree is certainly older than all of them, and that's also another layer. So it is a contemplation of time. However, there are two very clear or like there's a great contrast between two aspects of time in your film. One is these sort of like observations of time as process sedimentation. You look at the soil, the soil is explained, learning is looked at as a process,
people are seen in multiple stages of learning, but then there are moments of ritual in which is total presentness. I don't know if you were like Anjali on the presentness side or the process and Kojo on the opposite, or if you had some sort of structured awareness of these two levels, one which is completely present in the film and another one which is looking at this tension between past, present and future. So I don't know if this is an actual difference or simply something that emerges from viewing the film. I mean, there are past, present and future going on there. You know, in India, you could be at a bus stop or a traffic light and you can see a cow and an elephant and a car and a, you know, and a motorbike or whatever.
So it's, oh, I've got stuck here. Temporarily grabbed by the chair. Temporarily grabbed. thing. But the, for me, I mean, yes, there was the rituals, but there was also the dance, you know. So, for example, there are two different kinds of, three different kinds of dance going on in the work. One is the dance of the Sampalis, which is a dance in formation, as you can see of these women who dance in formation and vertically to a beat. It is like kind of techno almost, the way they're moving in a line. And then there is the dance that you see, I mean, yeah, then, I mean, not techno, there's
a kind of electronic music kind of aspects or vibe to the way that they are kind of moving in like in this way. and then there is the dance of the Tagore kind of choreography of these dancers who are dancing for the Spring Festival. They're all dancing for the Spring Festival. But the Tagore, you might not realize it, but the Tagorean dance that he wrote, that he scripted, his choreography was nothing to do with necessarily ancient Indian classical dance. It was more to do with Swan Lake and Music Hall but he kind of, musical dances that he experienced when he came to Britain or saw ballet. How about the masks? Was that a Tagorean idea? The masks were for the Santali dances.
Yes, well, this was a kind of moment of sort of trying to introduce a, well, it was a kind of moment that happened very quickly because there was an exhibition at the museum in Shantimakaten of some of these votive objects that Tagore would bring back and these votive objects were no masks so you had in the collection these masks and then it was the Spring Festival of Holy and we were driving and saw these stores selling these reflective masks and I was like well that's we just have to use those and you know then we asked the dancers if they would like to wear them, they loved it
they were like sure, they just wanted definitely, why not but for us this also created like a block between the ethnographic like with the ethnographic like this desire to see in their faces something essential or something original or something authentic it was more to enhance their uniformity conformity and the rhythm if you like and break it the presence with plastic the whole of the world is littered with plastic you know um this was a way of kind of bringing plastic onto the sort of you know as a kind of context as a kind of form of contextual collapse if you like like let's enhance this plastic on the face
as a kind of reflective force field. So, yes, that's the story of the masks. It was to think about that trace of Japan in Shantung-Kaisen on the centailles because Tagore had several obsessions. You know, he loved the centailles who live all around the area, who, you know, it's a very matriarchal kind of indigenous group of people. They are all over India. They're called Adhiavasis. Adhiavasi means the original inhabitants. And the Santals are like the original inhabitants. They also feature like in a lot of the paintings of Tagore's family.
So, who are all painters? So, yes, we asked these ladies if they didn't mind dancing, and they loved the idea. But then we went to the Spring Festival. We watched many of them compete. It's not exactly a competition, but there's many different dancers dancing. So, yes, I would say that in relation to what one might think is a kind of classical Indian dance or whatever, isn't actually and what one might think is kind of in you know indigenous dance you know actually comes across as much more modern or you know so for me these were ways of breaking time as
well. I was just looking at the time and since we have a number of people here who may know the work of the Otelit group perhaps it's actually a moment to also open up to their comments or questions Maybe some of you guys have already seen O Horizon, which opened today, just a few hours ago. The doors were open. But I don't know if somebody wants to ask a question. Otherwise, I'm going to ask a question. No book is full of them, but perhaps there's a question. Okay, we will go on for 15 more minutes. So just, you know, like 400 questions for your time. I'm going to ask another question regarding India. This is like a kind of hardcore question.
I like it. You know, like I was very impressed the first time I saw images of a modernist project brought to India, somehow adapted to India, which was Le Corbusier's Chandigarh facilities. And this is a certain version of modernism. Now, when we speak of Tagore as a modern thinker and someone who is driving to a certain extent the modernist thinking in India, how can we explain this difference? Because I think there cannot be more opposite attitudes than one like Tagore's and one like Corbusier's. Right. So this opposition might not be completely clear when you look at Chandigarh and you look at Shantiniket and how it exists, correct?
Yeah, nobody likes Chandigarh. I mean, everybody, I mean, it's an incredible city. In India. I'm sorry? In India. In India, yes. The Chandigarians don't like Chandigarh. It features in our film, Otter Live 2. we filmed there and we interviewed many people and we watched how all of the I mean number one it's concrete cement and concrete and all of the offices are filled with boxes and books and archives but people work on, take those chairs and tables onto the street and under the balistrads and in the shade you know they work this kind of
yes bungalows you know that sort of extend into these different quarters sectors of the city you know yes they are kind of beautiful bungalows our grandparents, my sisters here had a journal architect builds our grandparents home in Delhi it wasn't made of cement and concrete but it had that kind of wide feel you know big gardens at the back and at the front similar kind of atmosphere in Chandigarh in the kind of residential area and of course it is extremely impressive the um you know the secretariat and the sort of court and the parliamentary area and all of it but yeah I mean it is a it is a like uh we say I can't remember the script but we say like
we quote Kubizier's desire to control the sun you know and have it moving in different ways I would say the sun in Shantina-Katin helps things grow it nourishes it nourishes but also as I said Tagore was returning to an ancient pre-colonial form of education it wasn't exactly modern it wasn't exactly old it was a way of dealing with the occupation of Britain on India let's think about how to deal with the rural, this divide between the rural and the city, this division had been created. So how to engage with, let's say, landscape, land, how to put people back in touch with
land. Let's frame the land. Let's nourish the land. Let's tend the land. Let's touch soil, let's sit under trees, let's learn how to make circuitry, let's weave you know all these ways to kind of enchant re-enchant landscape. I guess that goes back to the ecology of improvisation which is not an economy of administrating nature, right? Yeah, I think when you visit Chandigarh it's clear that Corbusier is interested in monumentality. And monumentality isn't only a question of scale or a question of materials or a question of sight.
In Corbusier's work, which is overwhelming and deliberately so, there is this desire to, to in a way compete and master an environment. Corbusier's influences are grain silos and pyramids. He likes everything epic and everything in which the Promethean engineering of nature is the primary goal and objective and telos. That's the point of architecture. Architecture is a project of mastery. And so the impressiveness and the intimidating scale of a Corbusier project is at the service of that mastery.
And so, of course, in a way, what Corbusier wants you to do is to, in a way, consent to that sense of mastery, to be mastered by the monumental and to take your place in that project of mastery. and you know Tagore is you know when we think about Tagore it's difficult to distinguish between festival ritual and dance maybe what they all have in common is is um a practice of temporalization which means a practice of what we call temporal reprogramming and temporal deprogramming
An effort to situate yourself within time and to gain a phenomenology of time through practice, which then will provide you with the conditions for the social reproduction of that practice. so the practice contains within it the terms for the continuation of the practice and that's Tagore's that's more Tagore's ecological mode and so in that sense they couldn't be more opposed Tagore's methodology requires more people to dance together
and a notion of the dance requires an understanding of musicality and an understanding of song at its most cosmic. So in a way, I would say Tagore's ethos is in the song, whereas Cabousier's ethos is in the monumental. and I think that's a good way of you know and it's not that one is good and one is bad because they exert an equal fascination on us that's why we went to Chandler in 2007 and made the work there and spent several days filming and videoing and thinking about it because
you know there's no harm in admitting to the fascination to the spell that that work casts upon you. We're not going to sit here and say we resist Corbusier, we want to cancel Corbusier. It's quite the opposite. We're as enchanted by Corbusier as anyone else is. But Tagore is equally enchanting, but for very different reasons, you know. we just brought me to think about isabel stingers and think of tagores and corbusier as different as different types of woodcraft sure yeah absolutely um okay so maybe there's
a question or a comment doesn't have to be a question or a song or a song feel free to see. Difficult to ask questions about a video you haven't seen yet. Self-control. Yeah, but they don't need to be about the work you haven't seen. They can be about what you just heard. You talked a bit about the book before time went down. Yeah, well, exactly. This book that can be acquired since what like a month it was launched in London about a month ago. It came out in last November but copies reached people around the beginning of the year, right?
In fact, we were actually making already a comparison between different works of the Autolite group and Xenogenesis is we can say fairly retrospective, it will open soon. cross-section. That's what we prefer. A cross-section survey. Not survey. Not retrospective. A diagonal across. A diagonal that cuts across the last seven years. It's a cross-section of the authority group's trajectory. And it is also a companion is companion to an exhibition that is traveling the world since I guess 2018 as well and now 2019
started in Van Abbey in Eindhoven in Holland and it's ending in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin by the great creator great curator Annie Fletcher who both began the exhibition really She's going to end it as well. And also commissioned the Chandigarh film. Exactly. And there are multiple essays here. There's the poem of Tagore. I'm going to propose Angela for later perhaps. And many essays. And I think this is actually a very good way of driving through these transversal topics. But perhaps it's a very interesting topic. And I think it's a very interesting topic. transversal topics. But perhaps by way of closure, we can ask Anjali to recapitulate
what's going on. Is that? Which? Which point? Well, there's a section. Oh, okay. Yeah, there's a section of this. It's not all of it, but it's the first part of it. very kind of romantic today in a hundred years who are you sitting reading this poem of mine filled with curiosity today in a hundred years what fragment of today's joyous spring today's flower or wild bird song today's blood-red mood can I possibly transmit unto you
a hundred years from today. This was Togol, the year 1400, which is in the Hindu calendar, the year 1400 in Chitra it says, but then it was written in 1896. Yes. And it is the basis for the all horizon futuristic sort of gaze into today. So thank you. That was a beautiful reading. And they brought me just back to precisely the Autolite trilogy and those voiceover moments that you have that are so superb. It's quite amazing.
So if there are no comments or questions about what you have not seen, have to see yeah I can only encourage you to go see this amazing work it will be on until October 8th but as you know time flies so just go as quickly as possible and please watch it from beginning to end including the credit sequence the 10 minute credit sequence it's absolutely amazing and yeah well thank you Anjali Kojo So thank you for being here, presenting the work here. It's an absolute honor. I'm totally, yeah, enthusiastic and fulfilled by this conversation.
It will keep spinning in my head. Thank you everyone for being here, for accompanying us to this amazing talk. And I'm gonna ask for a big applause to Otten Group. you