Five Million Incidents | Lecture Performance
A Blanket of Sinusoidal Owls at Dusk

By Abhishek Hazra

Thursday, 5 - Saturday, 7 March 2020, 19:00-21:00
7:00 PM - 21:00 Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi

A Blanket of Sinusoidal Owls at Dusk is an attempt to mull over a marginal silence in a canonical text. This text can easily be compared to a South Asian shipyard from which a thousand elementary and insurgent ships have sailed to great academic acclaim. Over three evenings, this project will unfold through lecture-performances and acts of textual exhumation staged as durational writing. Post-performance, informal discussions will try to locate the Owl of Minerva hiding in Kasturba Gandhi Marg.

The marginal silence in this ‘shipyard’ text is such that it can easily trigger the absurd but strangely normalised caricature of ‘Two Cultures’. The project, however, will speculate other possible reasons for the shipyard’s silence while also being embarrassed about the sheer belatedness of such speculations. This might prompt the lecture-performances to address this silence tangentially by chronicling the misguided hunt for technosocial objects seemingly untainted by colonial histories.