The Coup will be Live and then Hyper-linked : Amitesh Grover, Shaunak Sen, Arnika Ahldag in Conversation

Notes: The Coup will be Live and then Hyper-linked : Amitesh Grover, Shaunak Sen, Arnika Ahldag in Conversation.

August 2016

image courtesy: KNMA

“You will not be able to stay home, brother.

You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.

You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and

skip out for beer during commercials,

Because the revolution will not be televised.”

--Opening lines from the song ‘The Revolution will not be Televised’ by Gil Scot-Heron, 1970.

One tends to realize that lines between the virtual and the real have long been blurred when a military state not only crackdowns into the houses of the protesting entities but also upon their web based presence to gag their voice. In such dynamics, can the components of dissent be pre-imagined? Perhaps imagining a coup will be to imagine of it in negation: of what it will not be. Hence, the aforementioned lines from the famous prophetic song. But instead of being caught in the binaries of what an erupting revolution ought ‘to be’ and what it ‘not to be’, can art perhaps propose an idea of coup emanating from the everyday?

Fourth in the series of ‘Invitation to a Coup’, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Saket hosted collaborating artists Amitesh Grover, Shaunak Sen and Arnika Ahldag on 4^th August 2016 in conversation with Akansha Rastogi. While Amitesh is a performance maker with a background in theatre, Arnika belongs to visual arts and Shaunak is a film-maker.  They desist from being clubbed as an artist-collective yet maintain that their projects take place primarily in the spirit of “friendship”. They have worked together on a few projects, namely Encounters 6134 (2014), Downtime (2014), and Notes on Mourning (2015). Less of a conversation, they chose a style of presentation that did not delve into doling out particulars about their collaborative projects. Instead, the evening was subsumed in a churning tied to the algorithmic format of hyperlinks like “Lies”, “Gossip”, “Speculate”, “Document”, “Experts” etc. Three of them took turns to speak about the projects whose subjects varied from mediated encounters, sleep economies, and mourning. They began the evening by highlighting the very paradox inherent in the semantics of ‘Invitation’, an unlikely protocol that aims towards a quintessential Coup. Therefore, they go on to insist that “this is not a talk and we are not a collective”.

Amitesh chose to emphasize on the same by reciting a poem by Octavio Paz called ‘Draft of Shadows’(1975). From the lengthy poem that is soaked in free-verse, Amitesh chose a few lines, one of which is: “the water is for reading, not drinking”.  After this interval, the baton is passed on to Shaunak as he holds up a sheet of paper announcing “ Lies”, hinting towards how a city forges a culture of uttering fabricated stories emphasizing social standing and material position. He adds that he is also fascinated by shape-shifters, tricksters and con-artists who according to him “use the G-spot of desire or love of people” to make ends meet. He recalled that in his film Cities of Sleep, (https://citiesofsleep.com/) has a statement where one of the experts, Ranjit claims that “if you want to know the social status of a person, just watch how they sleep.” The film spans many such shape-shifting characters existing in spaces that are make-shift.

The next hyper-link raised and explored was “Truth”. Amitesh confessed about the inability to authenticate the amount of truth, when he is working with testimonies and encounters with his ‘experts’. He maintains that “over-rehearsing can often alter the act of recounting”. He tells us that he has to constantly navigate between when and where to stop in accepting the narrations. Progressing organically from ‘truth’, Arnika Ahldag brandishes the hyperlink announcing “Gossip”. She reinstates that gossip claims of no truth, although it may appear wearing the garb of it.  Flying on the tangent of Gossip, Amitesh suggests “Speculate”, tying it along with ‘Event’ to the major thread of ‘Performance’. For Amitesh performance is something like the childhood memory of playing with small dolls and figurines locked inside alone a room.  Adding another dimension to the strand of Speculation, Akansha mentions of parables, say of the Roman poet Horace, which contain the inherent capacity to be pondered and speculated forever.

Moving ahead from “speculation” to “affect”, Shaunak talks about the trend of ‘cell-phone novels’ which are seemingly a rage in Japan. These ‘novelists’ fall in the age group of 16-35 and do this as a temporary job. Shaunak calls them the affective or emotional labour and constitute of a political public in the “digital domain”. Picking up the thread from the digital to the real, Amitesh mentions Pokemon Go, the most recent location based augmented reality game which has now begun to raise policing, piracy and surveillance issues. He claims that “this game has bypassed the world, where we are being mediated by pixies”. Making a reference to Baudrillard’s ‘Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared’, Amitesh points out that the post-modern world and it being irreversibly inebriated with reality which is only virtual, with simulacrum which is controlled, there is disappearance of the real and the tangible. Amitesh offers encountering the real and the tangible through his recent work called ‘Notes on Mourning’, a ritual based performance series where professional mourner Jayalaxmi, from Tamil Nadu performs the mourning session in front of an invited audience. Amitesh recalls the process she undergoes to begin mourning, the affect for which may stem from the ambiguity of her personal sadness and that of her client’s. He adds that even though the ritual is meant to be performed live, there are already digitally recorded CDs of the same being sold in the market for the times Jayalaxami cant be available. This adds to the cycle where simulacrum surpasses reality, disrupting attention spans and disembarking from memory registers. Shaunak pulls out the next hyperlink announcing ‘Attention’ where he recounts how it has become a scarce resource in the age of internet where ‘GIFs’ and incessant loops rule as they bank heavily on what he calls, “attention economy”.

Recalling an earlier project ‘Downtime’, Amitesh confessed that he was keen on knowing if one could look at sleep in and as a performance. In this project, he invited participants to engage in monitored sleep sessions. He pointed out that there are also “sleep-economies” that exist, and how it has been capitalized upon and there are retailers who sell and survive on it. While researching for the film ‘Cities of Sleep’ Shaunak, Arnica and Amitesh had stumbled upon Lohia Pull of Delhi and the agents like one Ranjit, selling sleep. This discussion brought out connecting nodes like Jayalaxami and Ranjit as ‘Experts’, which was also the next hyperlink to be raised by Arnika. This was explored further by Shaunak in how sleep can be understood also as a social construct making a mention of the 1925 founded Brotherhood of Sleeping Car-Poerters in Chicago which went on to become the first charter led by African-Americans to be a part of the American Federation of Labour.  

Talking about sleep-economies, Amitesh informs the audience of the most expensive mattresses in the world and how later the showroom for these mattresses was converted to a performance space for an invited audience. He points out that in such an intervention there was a "collapse" of the actor and the spectator and the interesting uncertainty emerged in the matters of archiving the value of what the performance-intervention has achieved. This not only subverts the idea of a performance space but also relinquishes the desire to monetise on the given experience of the intervention, hence defying value generating economies. 

At this juncture, the discussion was thrown open and the audiences responded by adding their own references. People like theatre artist Maya Krishna Rao, art historian Kavita Singh, Prof. Shukla Sawant, performance artist Inder Salim etc were among the attendees of the conversation. Akansha, made a mention of the Precarious Worker's Brigade based in the UK and which promulgates "tools" that include 'Bust your Boss' cards, 'Training for Exploitation Resource Pack' and also boast of a 'People's Tribunal on Precarity'. She also refers to C A Conrad's political “Soma-tic poems” like 'A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon'. Paribartana Mohanty, an artist present among the audience wanted the speakers to respond on the dichotomy of the labourers and the construct of 'experts' as explained by them. More specifically, he was curious to know whether this 'expert' sleeps, if at all.  To this, Amitesh responded in the context of how sleep has no longer remained natural and has been made industrial by conditioning it to the strict 8-hour sleep patterns. Asiya Islam, a student of Gender Studies present among the audience wanted to know if their collective work has in any way included a feminist perspective especially with regards to women laborers, their work hours and sleep. The reference she picked up was from the famous scholar Silvia Federici’s exponential work on Capital accumulation, self-ownership, labour power and its drastically taming effects on the psycho-physiological health of a population. Amitesh responded by admitting that a typically feminist trope was not applied in any of the previous works but perhaps the work Notes on Mourning, having Jayalaxmi as the Expert, one could tentatively look at the role of women in traditional mourning rituals as the active labor force. Another audience member was prompt to ask about the worker’s body at leisure-time, the time assigned for hobbies and creative indulgences, from a rickshaw puller’s to a corporate employee in contrast of the cityscape traversing through rush-hours. Shaunak expressed keen interest to work on these issues in near future along with exploring further on ‘Distractions’ as another hyperlink, to look forward to.