NO STRANGER AT ALL

Single channel video, 2022

 

It is decreed that the wind

Be captured in a fist,
It is demanded that the raging sea
Be held in a broken cup *
 

Over the last 2 years in Delhi starting late 2019, I wrote, filmed and recorded, as days and nights turned from collective rage and exuberance to withdrawal and solitude. The search was along the edges of disquiet and premonition, in fragments and intensities, through wandering and not-staying. Perhaps down pathways made from adjacent knots of desire, seeking solace,
seeking life. This video / essay has been composed from those notes, recordings, slivers of prayers, non-intended sound, stranger-love, lamentations and extreme longing, in a city that absorbs, mirrors, tears apart, and simultaneously allays both remorse and euphoria.
 

What happens to the energy of attachment when it has no designated place? To the glances, gestures, encounters, collaborations or fantasies that have no canon? **

​

These incomplete fictions, these false closures and tenuous associations, compose a timeline of the city at an angle through the time of this work. There is a shadowy sense of a protagonist who un-dreams it all; a stranger, who turns out, is no stranger at all.
 

Somewhere I wrote:
… so much power, it is difficult to move towards love.

*Majrooh Sultanpuri translated by Baidar Bakht and Marie-Anne Erki
** Lauren Berlant, from ‘Intimacies: A Special Issue’

​

40min, in Hindi, Urdu and English with English subtitles