'Scintilla' is a continuation of my inquiry into witnessing through a sporadic understanding of time and cognizance towards reimagination for multiple futures where humans transcend anthropocentric boundaries and become part of the Kingdom Plantae. This research enquires about the possibilities of concocting social orders that challenge the established societal status quo. My enquiry is complex and is not based on the linear understanding towards the retreating of the British through South Asia as the end of colonisation but a further nuanced one where the postcolonial elite performs colonisation in their own society through the means of gender, economics, religion, and governance. It is in this context I have been exploring active imagination as a methodology of resistance. Through blurring the lines between human and plant life, I want to question the deeply ingrained hierarchies that govern our relationships with the environment and each other.
Set in Kolkata, a city that has long balanced its image as a beacon of liberty with its complex colonial legacy, ‘Scintilla’ a multimedia installation stems from postcolonial science fiction, a genre that serves as a critical tool for anticolonial imagination and envisioning futures that break free from the frameworks of subjugation. The project wants to look at the paradox that Kolkata has become—celebrated for its cosmopolitan identity and intellectual openness, yet haunted by the echoes of colonial subjugation, exploitation of its working class, its resistance against movements (regarding the response towards the Naxalbari movement), and the acceptance of religious fanaticism expressed through conservative Bangali society.
The work intends to further research and develop my past enquiries about challenging industrial colonial imagination— dispensed through popular culture, where the apocalypse is framed as a singular cataclysm ignoring the ongoing lived experiences of those already enduring the ravages of an unjust world through climate catastrophe, postcolonial violence and intergenerational trauma. I intend to engage in a form of space-making that critiques and analyses the way we imagine as a society through popular cultural practices, its inherent acceptance of preexisting power structures, intonations, constraints and prejudices.
In this work, I excavate Kolkata as a site for a fabulated temporality that is constructed as a community where human existence intertwines with plant life while challenging the notion of ‘Haunting’ from the perspective of the forthcoming. Through, ‘Scintilla’ Challenge technocratic visions of apocalyptic survival that perpetuate existing power hierarchies. The metamorphosed bodies present and imagined through this project are moments of resilience that are placed within an envisaged ecosystem, the fluid notions of an epoch.
The project is developed in collaboration with Binita Limbani, Harshil Limbani Soumik Ghosh, Suvojit Roy, Shibayan Halder and Santanu Dey with generous support from the Khoj International Artists Association.