by SAVVY Contemporary at the Kochi Muziris Biennale 2022/23
We are proud to partner with the
Kochi Biennale Foundation to bring
Geographies of Imagination: My Language is a Bedouin Thief by SAVVY Contemporary, Germany to the
Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022. The project will manifest as an exhibition featuring Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Gladys Kalichini, Fazal Rizvi, Samra Mansoor, Yara Mekawei and reconfiguring these obscured and suppressed histories through sound, audio-visual, text-based and installation works, charting across Karachi, Kochi, Hamburg, Chemnitz, Nuremburg, Munich, Lahore, Leipzig, and Cairo.
To be followed by a workshop, in the
Spirit of Kappiri Muthappan, that unfolds in January 2023, a collaboration with Sacred Heart College, Kochi and the public laundry and community space Dhobikhana with the Vannan community, connecting to the notions of solidarity and reverence to Kappiri Muthappan.
A
collaboration between
SAVVY Contemporary and
the
Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022. Supported by
Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan.
How does one belong to a territory that resists inclusion?
How does one embody a language that is imposed and lacks words to express one’s condition?
How does one extend language to gestures that evoke lands of the paths traversed, resounding voices deemed invisible, creating echoes in the air?
How does one become like the sand that slips through the fingers when attempted to be grasped?
Or the water that charts it path across terrains carving through obstacles, collecting and carrying stories to be discovered and shared, and dismiss the demarcations that attempt to create divisions within?
GEOGRAPHIES OF IMAGINATION is a growing research and exhibition project that manifests itself as a cartographic timeline, a performative process of un-mapping the geography of power and a space of discourse. The project is an attempt to rethink, reconfigure and pervert history-at-large and cartographic histories in particular. Each iteration of
GEOGRAPHIES OF IMAGINATION assumes a different point of departure, situates itself within another real or fictional geography.
Following the first two iterations in
Berlin and
Dhaka, the third rendition of this project revisits the obscured yet interconnected and interdependent histories of labour, enslavement, internal displacements of communities, and political prisoners and refugees embedded around the littoral zones of the
Malabar Coast and intersecting geographies from across the ocean and beyond that are deeply resonant to the past and existing fabric of
Kochi. These occurrences date back to the 7th Century covering a period of subcontinental conquests, European colonialism to the initiation of nation states and socialist regimes, where these communities continue to be abused, denigrated, and oppressed with the shift in power and identitarian shifts according to caste, religion, language, and geography.
Devising languages through gestures, movements, and sound for storytelling and ritualistic commemoration, this iteration deliberates on
how narratives could be poetically claimed while creating echoes through the relationship of the body to other bodies, the water and the soil. It navigates through the architectures of the land, soil and the sea recalling and establishing marginalized narratives. The gestures of care, self and collective, work through pain and generational trauma, assisting in carrying memory and history forward while forging bonds of solidarity across communities as a resistance to erasures. This solidarity sustains these communities, and those forgotten, connecting them and enabling them to share the unfolding of history through their narratives, sharing notions of belonging that supersede territorialisation and cartographies of power.
The first two iterations of the project were curated by
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and
Antonia Alampi, and the current iteration of the project is being curated by
Hajra Haider Karrar, and the workshop conceived and led by
Abhishek Nilamber.
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