So my name is Kojo Eshin. It's a great pleasure to be here. So first of all I have to say that neither I nor Angelika have had much time to see the work of the other artists here because we've been in a kind of troubleshooting relationship to the work O Horizon that we completed earlier this year. So maybe one way to open up this question of the relation between futurism and futures and futurity and why so many artists are turning to science fiction as a method of inquiry, why artists are turning to time travel
as a kind of methodology for investigating the present. Maybe one way to do that is for maybe each of us to talk about our work. Maybe Anjali could maybe say a bit about O Horizon and how we think of O Horizon as what we call a science fiction of the present. and maybe Harry would like to talk about his work. And then Anita herself can talk a bit more about her interest in the idea of Asian futurism and how she's thinking that through. So we'll bring those ideas to the table. We'll have a conversation and whoever wants to jump in and question any aspect of that is more than welcome to do that. So is that okay with all of you?
Okay, in that case, let's begin. Thank you, Kojo. Thank you, Anita, for inviting us to Kochi. It's really been a great pleasure to be here and show here. And what a beautiful pavilion. So as Kojo said, we haven't had much time to see everybody's work because it's taken so long to get our work up and running. You wouldn't think so. You just think you go and put a video on and it just plays, but it doesn't happen like that. but so you know I think it's it is very it's a really interesting proposition for us to you know that you made Anita and asking us to talk about Indo like futurism in India and sort
of Afrofuturism I think that's been very much part of Kojo Oseless Group's practice from the inception. From day one, actually, the first work that we made was in Star City at the Russian Space Agency, where we performed 28 parabolic flights and trained to be cosmonauts. And the film was a speculative essay film, a poem on the relationship between my grandmother, who was a feminist and president of the National Federation of Indian Women here in India, and her friendship with Valentina Tereshkova, who was the first woman in space.
It was a 20-minute film that led to many other films, but the otolith are basically crystals in your inner ear that guide your sense of orientation and balance in the world. And we became aware of these crystals that all of us have that sit on our inner ear, very tiny little crystals. Because when we were floating around in zero gravity, the cosmonauts said, well, keep your eye on a horizon line. Keep your eye on the horizon line, because on a straight line, anywhere in the plane, because that will stop you being sick. and I found this a very interesting metaphor, if you like, for the way that we live,
how gravity, you know, in a way condenses our living conditions, but it also gave microgravity, 2G, 3G, 4G, all these different gravitational aspects that you enter and you go through when you're actually physically going through the states of microgravity, this agravic space that we kind of inhabit gave us a kind of manifesto for the future in terms of how we wanted to I think be able to work hence the term the title of the collective the Otolith group was an umbrella I suppose for us to be able to practice all kinds of different ideas and make different
works. It also stopped people asking us where we are from. You know, two people of color, a man and a woman, you know, in London, in Britain, people are a little bit more careful, or at least they used to be. God knows what's going to happen now. But, you know, in Europe, certainly, and everywhere, people would just look at us like quizzically. But where are you from? Where are you really from? And I find, you know, this, you know, when we're thinking now around the way that identity politics are being used against us, I think one of the motivating factors or inspirational factors in philosophical aspects of what Afrofuturism has been,
very personally for me is where it comes from. What could be more alien than being abducted by slavers and taken halfway across the world and being placed in another part of the world? What is more alienating? The slavers are the alien abductors of millions of people who they put to death and actually, one could say, created finance capitalism out of this death. So, I think in all of our work, especially the recent one, well, all of our work is science fiction in the way that we try to create a structure of feeling
that we see our films as a sculptural, as a multi-sided shaped object, as a polyvocality that doesn't quite fit into the linear presence but can move through time and doesn't quite apply to the past, present or future but moves through it and shifts through it. And in this way, you know, we think of ourselves as runaway slaves or as fugitives of capitalism. In a way, there is this sense of how do we stop ourselves being consumed and put to death by capitalism and now by fascism, you know, which is harder.
How do we do that? And I think for us in our practice, maybe I'm making all these grand statements, and I don't mean to. It's just to open up these ideas, I suppose. But in O Horizon, which is a film that we made on Shantina Keitan, the school built by Rabindranath Tagore in 150 miles north of Calcutta, about 10 years ago when we first went there, we were thinking how do we make a film about an institution without it being a documentary and there is so much because Tagore has so much he's you know he's a he is a poly
I mean he one could say he's poly vocalist you know he created he's so much poetry novels theater and as a radical pedagogue he created this space so we were trying to think really about how the many aspects of this school and how we might enter that space and create a many-sided shape as a piece of work and I could go on but I think I'll I just like to tease out some things that when I saw the film, I was quite surprised. Although you're saying that, yes, those futuristic, but this particular film is so different,
at least to me. It is connected, of course, but its location and the fact that it kind of takes us back. But it's not nostalgia. It's actually going back and by going back, it's proposing something for the future. So this is very different. It's not nostalgic at all. I didn't find it at all nostalgic. But I found that in the location, the value that you give to the setting, the sound, the woman singing, the tempo, the temporal nature of the film, how it moves, like it takes us you know, to the Turgorian desire for a much more holistic, well, why education, a much more holistic world.
And I thought, actually it goes back, but it actually proposes a future. If you could talk a little more about the film itself, it'd be great. I mean, because it is, you know, Shantini Ketan is a strange place. I mean, I think when Geetha Kapoor said, when was modernism, you know, and talks about Shantina-Katen as a living museum. I don't know how many of you have had a chance to see O Horizon, but if you remember, it opens with this scene of a road being built, and there is this machine with smoke belching, and over this smoke
a female voice starts reading a poem by Tagore a poem that he wrote at the end of the 19th century a poem called In the Year 1400 and the temporal structure of this film is like a diagram for the whole video the temporal structure is of Tagore in 1896 writing to someone who will read this poem in the future, and this reader of the future is looking back on this poem. So there is this complex temporal structure of forward pastness, and we took the structure of this poem as a kind of idea of time travel,
or an idea of editing, and in a way this poem is a portal, it's a doorway. If you step through this portal, you enter into a world which, as Anita says, really functions as what Edouard Glisson calls a prophetic vision of the past, a past that seems to signal a future or a future that seems to come from a past. And so for us, this poem gave us something like the beginning of a reading practice, what Yves Kosovsky Cedric calls a reading practice. It gave us a method for reading Tagore and realizing that there were moments of complex time travel
within Tagore's vast body of work, so that we didn't have to give a history of Shantanikatan, We didn't have to do a hagiography of Tagore or a biography of Tagore. We could take moments from his writings and then connect those to the work of the great masters whose work exists in the campus. K.G. Subramanian, Benoad Bahari Mukherjee, Nandal Alboz, Ramkin Kabayaj. You know, you see their work. and because it's video, video can bring you close to this work. It creates a context of attention that really,
when you walk through the campus itself, is not really evident in exactly the same way. So everything becomes more compressed, more heightened, more lyrical. And so this is not a documentary. it's something like what we call visual study or it's something like what Fred Moten calls black study and Fred Moten who's a thinker that we are very much inspired by makes a distinction between black study and black studies you know black study is the formal study of the history of western civilization and how to destroy it and then black studies is what you're doing all the time with your friends when you're hanging out
having a drink talking about your favorite music that's black studies that's that's what he calls aesthetic sociality and so the the video is really studying sociality how people are together and how people are in the presence of these murals, of these sculptures. And we tried to set up the conditions for a kind of scale model of time travel because what we realized was that the Tagore family, they had terraformed the whole of Shantaniketan In order to design Shantanakatan from the ashram to the children's school, to the art school, to the university it is now, to Shrinakatan, the Tagore family had to think through the whole campus from the soil upwards.
They had to bring new soil, they had to bring plants, they had to bring trees. Then Tagore builds tree planting festivals. So it was a scale model of geoengineering at the level of the whole campus. And once we realized this, this meant that we couldn't really make a distinction between ecological practice, artistic practice and scientific practice. All of these are ongoing within Shantinikaten, which then becomes something like an artificial living laboratory. so even though it seems like a natural landscape it's not so we try to invoke the kind of
the kind of artificial world that Shantaniketan is and the way people are habituated to it right? because if you're an 18 year old student you're not necessarily thinking either of Tagore or how artificial your environment is you're just moving through it but we are outsiders so we bring a translational aesthetic we continually re-translate the environment and so these are some of the ideas that we try to bring to it there are many more but I'm aware that Harry hasn't had a chance to speak yet so I'm going to hand over the microphone Thank you for the opportunity
sorry my English is not perfect but I will talk about the futurism. So when I see the futurism actually, everything like in art actually is connected with science. Like when we use the mobile phone, actually if we see the case of Nicola Stella, he used in 19th century about the stereosphere for medium for communication between people through the satellite or satiosphere. And then we call also futurism. And when we see Eser, the painter from Holland,
actually he's based as a mathematician, but not really successful as a mathematician, so he become painter, but also connected with the Mobius tape, you know, the tape can, the preface can go inside and outside. And if you see like Pablo Picasso who get inspiration from sculpture and mask from Africa, actually he also interested about the four-dimensional phenomenon. Today we have 3D photocopy. Maybe it's not strange to see sculpture in 3D photocopy, but in the time of Picasso, I think he tried to describe the phenomenon through his work.
That's why he make one figure in different angle. And if you see in the traditional art, art, like in Indonesia we have the dagger or crease. Actually, this good quality of this dagger, they always use the meteor stones to remind people that we live on Earth but also connected with another galaxy. And also when we see the mandala, the mandala perspective, actually also futuristic mind about map where we are and another connection with other things in our life. So a few years ago, I think in 1970s,
NASA also sent some gamelan sound to the space, to outer space. So in this age, actually, we live controlled by the satellites. If you use Instagram or WhatsApp or SMS and others, actually not connected by cable, but we connected from outer space. We are not really anymore to see the moon and the stars and something exotic, because we are looking from outer space to the Earth. So in the future, maybe our imagination to talk about planet Mars, like in the story of Las Gordon, probably will happen, you know,
when we call not anymore as universe, but multiverse. So in the Muslim religion, they talk about genie before human being. But then in science, we call aliens. And probably we can describe that they are our brothers, but in different places to live. So in the future, no, I mean, when I was a student, I read the story of Vasily Kandinsky so when he wants to describe about rhythm spontaneity and improvisation he cannot describe in visual art theory but he has friend as a composer so he explains in music about
rhythm, improvisation and spontaneity in his painting. So when I was a student, I inserted it in mandala way, in mandala, because in mandala there is no concept of object, everything subject. Even air, water, fire, those elements exist in our body as microcosmos. So when I saw this issue about mandala, So I combined with Gestalt, philosophy, Gestalt, psychology Gestalt, about the optical to see form and space and other things. Because I want to make installation, art installation,
but I have no, I cannot describe what the installation, you know. So I have to see from the mandala and also the Gestalt. Because I asked my teacher and they said they don't understand about installation at that time. So when I come to the art school, I brought my aquarium. So my teacher said, why you brought your aquarium? Yeah, this is my artwork. I put all many objects inside aquarium without any animal, without any fish. But I need the place for water as a container. And this is artwork. This is in 1984 when I brought my work and rejected by my teacher because you have to
bring your painting. But I can make painting at home, one day I can make edge paintings. So as student, I need only to give 12 paintings. So I think in creativity, we need something innovative, but the other non-conventional work, we need inventiveness, not only to develop, but to go to the other area to develop the works. So the futurism, I think the spirit exists in many, many years ago, You know, like, but I think it's not about the time like today, but something the spirit that happened, you know.
But people describe with other, how to say, maybe from spiritual or, you know, the other from scientific things. Thank you. I'll just actually, in this context, I'll just speak about this building. So when we were thinking about a space for conversations, I was in dialogue with Madhav Raman, who's the architect of this building, and we thought that Kabralyaar is such a beautiful place with trees, you know. There was no such structure existing at that time, and when we entered, we were just mesmerized by the absolute beauty of the trees and the canopy they themselves formed.
formed. And then we thought that maybe if we, even a small structure that we design, maybe we should not try to actually have it completely transparent. So that we just, we are neither outside nor inside, and we just don't lose sight of the place that we are in, and that we are surrounded by trees and the canopy and everything like that. So just to say, And then we were also thinking about the fact that it could be like a spaceship, but it's a little sunk, as you know, in the ground. So it's a little sunk, but it's also floating. It's kind of, you know, held by the canopy of the trees. And actually, just to say that through this piece of architecture,
also imagining a kind of, let's say, a state of futuristicness, which is floating, which is also connected to the earth, but also connected to the sky. And it's very luminous. You can see everything in and out. And things flow through it. Air flows through it. People flow through it. Ideas flow through it. So all of that. So just to share something about the architecture which is connected with these ideas. But as you know, it's also a space where one has to project. and therefore it can't be completely transparent. But working through ideas like that and using architecture and new means to be able to try to imagine
something that we can call possibilities for a future thinking and just something else. I just wanted to add one more element to that because I see this place as creating a certain context of attention, a certain structure of perception, a certain invitation to focus around questions. And the fundamental question is, why are so many artists drawn to science fiction as a method? Why are so many artists drawn to the question of the future?
Why is the future a pressing question for us now? So even if we make, you know, we start off by making a distinction between the future as the everyday passing of time, one hour passing another, chronological time, and futurity as a kind of a qualitatively different time. So, you know, future is quantitative. It's just one time after another, one hour after another, one week after another, futurity is qualitative time. It's like a break-in time. It's a new time. Then I think we live in a time in which the qualitatively different time of futurity is breaking in on the future, and that qualitatively different time
is the slow but rapid violence of global warming. We are living through a so-called extinction event, in which species are dying, and we are living through the final days of the interglacial period, the 11,600 years or 10,600 years between the ice ages, which is where we have lived. All humans live inside of this threshold. We can't live outside of that envelope. At the same time, what climate violence means is that this 1.5 degree overall temperature rise will disproportionately affect the people of the African continent.
If it's 1.5 degrees across the planet, then within the continent, that's even more excessive. So we will have more desertification and more flooding. People who live on the coastlines will be flooded. you know already you know pacific islands four pacific islands have disappeared under the water so we know that this is a reality we know that we are living through something like a transformation which has catastrophic consequences for large parts of the continent and the people the kind of the neoliberal capitalism which is responsible for this will effectively seclude themselves away from it.
And I think this condition, I think, forces artists or confronts us with our inability to truly comprehend it and confronts us and challenges us to come up with artistic languages for grappling with this, for making it sensorial, for making it shared, for making it public, for the fear, the anger, the entire range of emotions that this prospect confronts us with. So the future is... Futurity is a hostile process which is ongoing and breaking into
the capitalist future that we are all embedded in. And this relation, I think, is part of the reason why these terms, the future, futurism, futurity, futurology, these are why these terms start to matter to us now. And it's why this space matters. Because maybe we need spaces like this because this question goes far beyond the intergovernmental panels on climate change who meet in Helsinki or in Paris. That's fine for those 500 scientists, but what about the rest of us? it's a global phenomenon which means we have to come up with non-scientific languages for these processes and maybe this is one of art's
challenges now exactly I mean this is something that I think it came up yesterday also that one way to think about futurity was through you know science fiction and space and time travel and something I did say yesterday that What about the earth? We seem to, when we are thinking about the future, how are we thinking about the land and the earth, which is, you know? So as a kind of a flight, so in my understanding, a lot of thinking about futurity is to do with flight of some nature. to fly out of the oppression, the difficulties,
everything that was around, you know. And just so I've been, I mean, when you go through the exhibition, probably you'll notice that, that somehow I've been kind of trying to ground even the whole exhibition and thinking about land and earth as a very important site to start thinking, perhaps reimagining or even reconnecting futurity to that site. So just open it up. I mean, when, I think, when you begin to... And I see that in O Horizon. That's why I was very touched by that film. Thank you. I mean, I think for us, Tagore was a vitalist. He wanted to take children out of the classroom
and put them under trees. he wanted but he didn't only want that i mean i think he wanted to have people using their hands you know india is a heavily you know it's a caste system there's only certain people that use their bodies and their hands and they're you know touch the soil if you like um the soil scientist we met in srinaketan said soil is soul of infinite life you know um and i think the sense of having an experience through our senses, all of our senses of life, was very important to Tagore. And there is a sense that, you know, it is in India in a way where we learn, you know,
I learned to meditate when I was younger through turning the senses inward in order to go out, to go into this cosmos but through, by going inwards through the body and my father Sam was an artist and he studied in Delhi and some people Ranveer Kaleika and Ranveer Kaleika Ranveer Kaleika has talked about my father's work as tantric abstractionism and I was always, and I realised that he'd been so influenced by Tagore because he really knew how to do everything, make things, cook, be outside, have us making things outside.
So this sense that one grew up with one's senses like fully kind of active, but as a decolonizing process, as an unlearning process, I think for us that's something to think about in terms of Tagore's legacy, in terms of what a radical pedagogy means now in relation to how students who... Students cannot go to... People cannot study unless they have money. And what is that doing? That is producing a classroom full of children or full of students who have... You know, they are, in a way, studying under occupation. You know, they themselves... We are under occupation, in a way, where we are, you know, in the cities that we live in.
we are under occupation. So in a way, I think Tagore, this kind of sense of him as a vitalist is interesting. Just to talk through Harry. Harry, in your work, there's so much of, you know, kind of mythical figures, you know, but they're not exactly figures from real mythology. You take from the structures of mythology and storytelling and fables and parables, and then build them into your work with angels, and there are some mechanical things happening. So it's a kind of strange mix. Would you want to talk about some of why you do that and why it's important for you to have been doing that for so long? Thank you.
Actually, in Indonesia, in Java, in Java we have the belief we call kejawen. Kejawen is like in Japan, like Sinto. So we believe everything has soul. The tree, the stones, everything has soul in our animism belief. So when I was a student, I combined with animation. So the concept of animation actually the same like animism. Only in animation is high tech, in high technology. Everything has soul. You see the spawn box, you see the chair can run. Everything, when I was a child, I liked to see the Walt Disney movie and also Hannah Barbara, you know, the cartoon.
So I think why they are all alive, everything alive. But in the belief of people also, everything has soul. So I combine between animism and animation. Because in any background of religion, they believe everything has soul. So, from this combination, and because I studied in high school, I studied mathematics, physics, biology, and chemistry. When I studied in art school, I treated this lesson as a science. So, because everything is exact, you know, in high school.
So when I studied art, we explored about our perception. So our perception actually in our right side of our brain. In the left brain, it's more about rational, logic, calculation, and we try to find the data objective through the left side of our brain. But in the right brain, it's a lot full of fantasy, imagination, inspiration. So from the data objective as a reference, I try, I find a new truth from the perception. So when I create the artwork, my work is become new data because I have the background of the reference from the data objective.
So when I was a student, I tried to find something anti-graffiti, you know, it's like how to make anti-graffiti. When I make sculpture, I want my sculpture not on the floor. I want something hanging or floating. And I have a doll. This doll, maybe 25 years in my house, is upside down dolls. And my neighbor guess I am, we call, super paranormal. They call me as a paranormal because I put upside down doll in my house and they scare because why you put the doll? Because I have to remind about the anti-gravity things, you know, like that. And I make all about the humor,
humor and something serious in my work, something like to create the conflict in one place. It's like beauty and the beast. So you can feel scared, or at the same time you feel fine, you feel happy at the same time. So I make the works in two directions. One is in fashion, in conventional work like in painting, sculpture and print. But in installation, performance art and shadow puppet, I make more inventiveness. And I think it's good to make a merger of the science and art and other things.
Because today there is not anything original. So it's good to, we call it now, we call it the eruption age, that nothing like Thomas Alva Edison or talk about the book, about the light, to inspire in the era of impressionism because every artist crazy about the light at the time. Because for me, science and art is always connected. Every new phenomenon, artists can follow. So now, in the era of, maybe now we call citizen,
but I mean, a long time ago, we call us as citizen, but now we call netizen, because the population of netizen much more than citizen. I think just I was thinking when you were speaking about this idea and Kojo was talking about time travel and you were as well and I was thinking about and thinking about slavery and thinking about Afrofuturism from the perspective of many African American theorists and philosophers and novelists. and this sense that, like Kojo said, of course we are living through an extinction period, but that forces us to actually return
to the multiplicity that we are, which has to take flight and unlearn this system, which is dying, clearly. This old system is so corrupt. heteronormative white males are and other males are destroying everything and their and this is in a way maybe their last gasp but on but it is also a chance for us to really unlearn and return to or not return but to continue to be a multiplicity which doesn't need to be quantified and doesn't need to be qualified as a category. And that doesn't mean there's a kind of separability that happens with difference
that doesn't require identity politics to be put upon us as categories. But the unlearning, I think, is where we can find freedom and not an emancipation from this system. That is not a freedom. To be emancipated, to want to be emancipated from this system that wants us dead and categorizes us. Freedom is something else. It takes a huge unlearning and time travel through different elements, through different ideas. I want to just speak about this as well. Because we started by saying that there is this, the whole question of exile, a whole population taken from one place and put somewhere else
and what a catastrophic exile it has been for. slavery as a space of exile. And therefore, because you're robbed of land and you're robbed of actually a physical location, you're just exiled into something completely. And therefore, the flight as this great potentiality, you know. And therefore, and completely, of course, I love it. But then also the possibility that after this flight, because this exile, to imagine the possibility of not return, but to imagine the possibility of land as well. You know, that's what I'm trying to propose that, you know, there was an exile and therefore the exile produced this urge and the need for flight.
and through that can we now imagine something to connect back to the land I think I think you you know you're pointing to a kind of a certain kind of artistic tendency towards notions of flight and travel and escape and a kind of imaginary of movement and travel. But there is a parallel trajectory, which I think is just as important and maybe becomes more important over time. So, you know, in 1960, Frans Fanon writes, The Wretched of the Earth, Le Damme de la Terre,
The Wretched of the Earth. And then, of course, a few, just in 2015, 2016, Hito Stahl writes, The Wretched of the Screen. And just this year in the UK, some two great critics based in the UK Ros Grey and Shela Shaikh published their new version of their new issue of third text and they called it The Wretched Earth so the subject is the earth the earth is wretched because it's it's under threat it's toxic it's the subject of fracking it's entirely at the object of techno-scientific biochemical processes
and so the whole issue of the new third text which if you haven't read I strongly recommend it is part of what people these days call botanical conflict so it's about engaging with the politics of soil which means the politics of botany which means the politics of seeds which means the politics of plants and trees and so on. And the name of our video, O Horizon, refers not to the sky, as you might think. It sounds like a song to the sky, and in a way it is, but it actually refers to agronomy, the science of soil, and O Horizon is the name that soil scientists give
to the surface layer of organic matter that exists on the earth, so that the soil that we are in contact with right now, out there, we are moving on the O horizon ourselves. And then they divide the soil into different horizons. They talk about O horizon, A horizon, B horizon, C horizon, and E horizon. I actually didn't know that until we met a soil scientist in Srinikatan who explained this to us. As soon as we heard this term, O Horizon, we were like, that's the name of the video. That's it. We just both knew it. And so he gave us something like an insight into the chemistry of soil,
which became for us simultaneously a poetic method into understanding soil as an architecture and an infrastructure for the planet. And he explained how the soil in West Bengal is lateritic soil. It's weathered, it's rusted, it's red. And how West Bengal has taken on an entire replanting process that has changed the nature of the soil, has totally transformed it. And then we realized that Shantinikaten itself is also a small-scale model of terraforming. So what we began to see, we began to see Shantinikaten as a kind of total artwork
that begins with the soil and has designed itself long before Pierre Wieg and these other artists, Tagore had already envisioned Chantinicayton as a total art world, and we began to see West Bengal itself as a world engaged in a continuous botanical struggle with elements. So I think this speaks to this question in which the question of the politics of nature enters into the questions of the politics of land and soil, which become more and more urgent. So in this sense, for us, Tagore started to seem extremely contemporary for us.
Things that happened in 1906 suddenly seem to speak to 2018. When you're making a video, you get these moments where the past confronts you. the past comes from the future and confronts you, almost attacks you, like that audio, that audio sound that keeps on attacking us. Where does it come from? Who is sending it? These kind of audio events that arrive, attack us through the ear, and then disappear. Thank you. Can we take some questions, please? Any questions? A question for Anjali and Kojo.
But before that, a little comment and a compliment on this beautiful structure, which is truly amazing. And I was doing a little math and I realized the Biennale is 90 days. It's 90 artists. So one artist speaks about their work each day and we are all set. Coming to the question, two things. I saw your work in 2006, the one which is about futurism in a certain way, time travel and anti-gravity. And this seems to be a huge leap. The work I haven't seen already, but I've heard enough to get some sense of what it is. So I think it will be exciting to know a bit about that journey and the thoughtfulness which brings you to this from that.
And the other thing which occurs to me when we constantly talk about futurism and in defining it, speak about the necessity to collapse time in a way that there is the going forward and the going backward. I'm thinking in this day and age, perhaps it would be interesting not to avoid the word virtuality along with futurism. And when I say virtuality, I mean it in the sense of how Griselda Pollock talks about the virtual feminist museum, for example. Or for the moment, just sticking to virtuality in the sense that everything is put on one platform, historically collapsing time, but also demographically and in terms of distance.
So would you think of virtuality along with futurism? the question of Afrofuturism would be something quite different and perhaps not within the purview of already these two questions. So I'll leave that for a while. You're talking about some... I mean, it's a long response to kind of talk about sort of nearly 17 years of practice in terms of each work and how each one folds into the other one with kind of like themes or sort of... I don't know, but... ideas that persist through each work. But you're talking about 2006? Oh. Right. Okay. Well, maybe you could say something about that.
I mean, I see continuities, you know. I see a kind of continual interest in trying to reverse perspectives. in O Horizon there is an attempt to to imagine a frame in which the trees are as important as the humans when you have humans in front of a tree we tend to see the humans as the front and the trees as the back the humans are the figures and the trees are the ground we spent a lot of time huge amounts of time saying how do we make the tree as important as the humans? How do we make the bunion trees
into the actors they are? How do we get to foregrounding that? We had ideas of doing animations in which you travel under the soil and you show the network of roots and funguses communicating and exchanging nutrients. Of course, there wasn't time or money to do that, but it's this vision we have. So this perspective of trying to show, trying to at least think with and from the perspective of the tree, I think is part of a kind of reversal.
In Otolith 1, there is a desire to see the idea of ground from the idea of weightlessness. the idea is to turn conditions into variable contingencies to turn control into chance I think that's the contingency and that's the thread running through everything and the question of virtuality to me is related to the question of technical reproducibility it's a condition of of living with reproducible images, and it goes back to the notion of the imaginary museum, Andre Malraux's imaginary museum, where photography makes all of sculpture available.
You know, that picture of Malraux with all those photographs and illustrations from his books spread in front of him, so where the writer becomes the curator who surveys civilizational values spread out in front of them. Part of virtuality, I think, is about that, the promise of being able to access all times and all spaces. So in that sense, it's a kind of, you know, there's an aspect of kind of an imperialist possessiveness about it, but it doesn't have to be, because it can also be about a kind of capacity to think outside of periodization
and to kind of collapse and rethink the inherited categories of art history that we've grown up with. So it's an opportunity to think outside of speculation about time. I think it's been very well put by one of our favorite science fiction authors, an Argentinian author, Adolfo Boy Cazares, who wrote a book called The Invention of Morale, which is a kind of amazing science fiction book. I mean, part of the thing for me about science fiction is you can see it everywhere in many places that are not science fiction, or they don't call themselves science fiction. When you read Tagore's short story, The Hungry Stones,
about this, you know, written in 1895 about this tax collector who goes into this ancient palace and he has these audio, they might be hallucinations, they might be visitations and at the end the argument is that the house, the palace itself has had so many experiences that the palace is something like a playback machine that plays back the experiences that have happened which makes Tagore something like the prefiguration of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. So Tagore's idea that the house plays back is like the Overlook Hotel, right? Which plays back Jack Torrance over and over again. And so there, to me, Tagore was already touching on a technology,
but he wasn't you know he wasn't a frontier colonizer so he wasn't about a time machine and an engineer and all of that it was about an experience that is encoded in architecture you know so the question is an architecture like this what will it play back and who will receive those playbacks Hi I'm not an artist I have my background in software engineering. So recently I was visiting most of the Binali exhibits and one thing I wanted to know was an artist of the future, maybe in the future the materials
and the things that an artist might be using would be intelligent. So as a software engineer, if you are writing a program, it's a representation. A program is a representation. It does not change. it is static. Once you write a program it stays there. So I found the same parallels in the work of art also like if you go most of the exhibits they just remain static. Whatever was in the mind of the artist still remains throughout. But I was just thinking when I moved to teaching now and any representations on the students they are not static representations they keep changing, they are very dynamic how and And I found it very difficult initially when I started teaching.
So I just wanted to ask if an artist is using some material and he makes a representation to depict whatever he wants to depict. So there is a certain meaning which he wants to convey. But the materials are in such a way that they transform over time and the meaning could change maybe to something drastically opposite. So how would an artist respond to that? it's not my original question, I was reading about something called interactive art where the observer looking at the art can actually interact and transform the art itself. Now how would an artist respond to it? Because I think if that problem is solved by the artist, that is
what is more or less going on with even the social systems or the planet earth. Because somebody has made, nature has made a representation and we as part of that nature we are transforming trying to transform it or control it and there are forces so so the same relation between an artist and his creation the representation so i just want to know how would artists respond to such a creation of his own i would like to just respond very quickly and then i'd like maybe you would like to respond to him but i would just I think we are living in a time where technology has definitely become part of us, right? Algorithms are the extension of us, in a way. We are living in a time where all kinds of people are manufacturing their realities,
are making their realities in that sense of the observer, kind of producing this instant reality. but they are producing it like it's being produced in a way that is incredibly negative the alt-right fascists are controlling the machines as such how do we move as a multiplicity and as Fred Boten says consent not to be a single being but move as a multiplicity with shared differences that are not antagonistic or at least are productively antagonistic? How does that become, how does technology get used in a way that is what it was supposed
to be in a way, like this cybernetic kind of network of relation that was enhancing and problematizing time and problematizing distance and, you know, working for us in a way. Everything from data to dust to the cosmos. How do we become cosmological beings? I mean, that, I think, is the... How that is the artwork, in a way. That's... Is it... Have you been answered? Then maybe when we finish, maybe we can talk outside. Any other questions? Yes. Hello.
I just wanted to ask you to just extend the conversation as to can you talk a little more about the speculative agency embedded in thinking about futurity in your work? And how does one think of speculation today, especially in your work, the one that's in the binale. And another interesting thing that I found is the title Over Horizon sets a sort of a vantage point that's almost medial that you can travel back and forward in time which I found really interesting. Yeah, I couldn't get the question. I just wanted to, can you talk a little more about the speculative agency embedded in thinking about
futurity speculative agency in thinking about I mean we're in we're in a responsive environment right now you know the idea is that the the sky and the trees co-constituting this space and this time that we exist in the structures that maintain the ceiling, that maintain the floor, that maintain the walls. These structures are not permanent conditions. They are temporary conditions which create an enhanced awareness of the kind of infrastructure of our existence at this moment. So this is not
at all speculative, you know, and yet clearly this is the outcrop of design. This was designed by an architect with a curator who thought it through and in a way brought everybody into this speculative project, which then takes on a temporary autonomous existence. So the question of speculation and agency is kind of built into the making of artwork, and then it becomes a question of specific decisions that we make. in this video the question is is really how to how as I said it's how to build what we call
an interscalar vehicle it's how to work on what we call the poetics of scalarity how to move from the soil to the stars, how to move from the earth to the sky, how to move from the roots of the banyan tree to a drone's eye view above the trees without necessarily collapsing into the sublime or into the abject as two poles which tend to organize scale, but how to create a context of attention for scale. I think these days the question of agency is a question of scale. and artists, these days we think of our work as,
we're very much interested in the work of the American historian of science, Gabrielle Hecht, and she has this notion of interscalar vehicles. So I would say that's the way in which we think of agency these days, as interscalar vehicles which travel between scales and are both a kind of method of study and an object of study. And we tried to do both of those things. I also sort of... I mean, if one imagines that... or doesn't imagine or realises that everything is sentient, you know, and alive and has rights, and if you are somebody who believes that you can go out there
and speculate on building some pointless building or extracting some mineral out of the earth and talking to your wife like she's a piece of shit. If you continue to behave like this, you are a monster, right? You are truly a monster. And if you believe that there's anything out there to draw from and use without any kind of responsibility, any kind of ethical responsibility, You are a monster. And you need to unlearn that shit fast because it's going to kill you otherwise. So I think when it comes to a speculation, a speculative...
I mean, it's just to extend from what Kojo was talking about in terms of... He's talking about an interscalar vehicle as almost this sensitizing machine like machine that sort of sensitizes us to these different experiences of life, right? If you follow coltan that's in our phones and the life of this mineral, you will, you know, how do you, people, I'm very interested in empathy now because like how do you become empathetic and political to the extractive, politics that go with these machines and the people that are working to, you know, pull this
shit out of the ground for us all. I mean, these are toxic, you know. There's so much about this world that is toxic and comes out of extraction. So, yes, I mean, just to return to this thing on sentience, you know, if you assume that everything is sentient, everything is alive around you. Everything has its right to be here. Every mineral, every tree, every animal, every human being, every body of water, every mountain. Then how do you exist from then on? Yeah, you talked a bit about sci-fi, science fiction work and the subject of climate change.
So you talked about the difference between the future and future break in the futurity. To me, the subjects that science fiction writers have dealt with before, like a future of robotic domination or alien visitation, in those cases, the break in the futurity was a bit further away than climate change. It is happening right now. do you think that changes the capability of artists to deal with such subject or such crisis that humanity is facing? And second thing, to deal with, not just deal with this crisis for an artist, there can be two ways. One can be to appeal to the utopian solution
as you were describing connecting to the earth and going back to our roots, or there can be another approach about appealing to the horror of the situation. How do you perceive that choice as an artist? I think the work of forensic architecture in London has been greatly inspirational because, I mean, we are living, and because their work is about sort of the methodology that you can work with to basically expose the scene of a crime, right? Art isn't necessarily about making paintings and sculpture, as most of us know. It is also about exposing things that are invisible. Many forces are invisible now that create the scene of a crime.
The climate collapse and the environmental horror stories that we are living in. India, plastic, you know, dirty water, whatever it is, whatever's going on, cement. You know, there are so many scenes of crimes. There are so many crimes that are being committed in the name of architecture, in the name of development, in the name of progress. I mean, this is one of the things I was talking to about with the students in Shantini Kate, and I was saying the artwork isn't only the work in the studio, it isn't only painting and sculpture. Of course, a lot of them knew that, but I was saying it is also about going and speaking to the people who are serving you your tea. It is also about going and speaking to the people who are selling stuff next to dirty water.
How do you raise awareness of these things? But that's one part of it. How do you expose the scene of a crime? That is an artwork. I think the real, the abstract and concrete horror of the real consequences of global warming mean that the futurity is a threat. It's no longer a promise. But what this does is send us back to utopia. When you read Thomas More's Utopia, you realize that Utopia in its formation is a colonial project.
When you read Utopia, what do you find? King Utopas, that's his name, King Utopas lands on the kingdom of Abraxas. Abraxas is on the mainland. So Abraxas is an island. and what he does is he forces the people of Abraxas to build an isthmus, to build a bridge to the mainland. And the second thing he does is rename Abraxas Utopia. So these two moves, landing, sorry, these three things. First, landing in Abraxas. Second, forcing the people to build a bridge. And then thirdly, renaming the kingdom. these are the three primal scenes of colonization.
So utopia is a Western fantasy, actually more than that, a Western diagram for colonization. In this sense, we are anti-utopian, but we're also anti-dystopian because utopia and dystopia are kind of linked. And I guess part of the project is to think outside of those terms and to decolonize them in the name of a different way of thinking with the future that actually is a real abstract and concrete threat. Thank you, everybody. And we'll wind up at this point. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot for being here. Thank you, Zahid.