In Dec 2023 i was invited to create a large room installation at a 250-year-old Portuguese hospital building in Panjim, Goa for the Serendipity Arts Festival. The concern was sound-image dialectic, among other senses entangled, hosted within Veerangana Solanki’s curated set of “Synaesthetic Notations”. At the time of making this work, i’d been absorbed in Mladen Dolar’s lyrical paper “One Divides Into Two” (e-flux journal #33, 03/’12) with David Bowie’s plaintive “Ground Control to Major Tom…” on loop.
I responded with a sound+video+light-object installation entitled “Hello? Who is Speaking?” from intertwining threads of the ever-forming self: •• Who is this who, •• constituting and dissolving? •• What are these layers of fortifications, who forbade us from speaking? •• What is this profound loneliness, •• of one aware of itself reaching into the impossible chasm from you; •• the dialectic of the self as one, the desiring one, as two; •• the futility of reaching, the inevitability of reaching, of touching lack, of love.
An airy, tall, light-filled room of gray Kota stone floor, wood-glass doors, white square sanitary tiles bordered by lovely Portuguese roses. My plan was incomplete — space for improvising — in slack, things are found. When your eyes are open but you aren’t quite looking, you find perfectly shaped shards of a broken mirror on the dusty ground at exactly the right unexpected moment, its perfect thickness no longer available in shops around home in New Bombay. I intervened minimally in the room, cleaned it obsessively — to think, edit, reduce and so respect the room. I worked by my mother’s reminder to be kind to the visitor. I spent many hours with those who constructed. One on his own accord rose to help me tie my unplanned found-mirror object together and its form emerged in our silent connection, in our exchange of nylon wire loops.
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A false sun rises, its light in perpetual noon, it speaks to you, it tells you what to see. All you see is who you are. Are you?
At noon, you will be split, the split of awareness, awareness of the other, the other beyond a chasm, the chasm a void — Will you see? Will you choose to see?
How do i reach you? Not a sky, not an earth, not even light beneath my feet to lift me to you there; yet i see you here. All we have is more or less. Por que não fala?
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In this place, light is fragmented, visitors fragmented, the space fragmented. One particular mirror shard moved with such intention and elegance across the room, cutting through luminous shapes and sheets of shimmer.
What do you do with yourself in a space that entices you to look at yourself, that gives your voice a stage? What does your instinct do, what does your socialisation tell you to do? Why don’t you sit down on a seat that you’re not sure is a seat? Why do you touch what is sharp and you’d otherwise be sure to avoid? Why do you let your children play with broken glass? When you look at yourself, are you shattered or whole, uniform or glimpsed, is this who you are? What are you thinking? What do you hear? A spectrum of visitors of all ages, beliefs, professions scrolled through. Scores of them delighted in the dancing light, told me of dark shapes of their memories, unselfconsciously framed themselves in mirror selfies. Some even sang. Many stopped to talk, and a few sat down in the coolth to wait for a minute.
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Satya — Installation Design, Vocals, Keyboard, Words
Rob Frye — Woodwinds; Chicago
Kanishka Sarkar — Production and Technical Consulting; Berlin
Acknowledgements
BICAR, Bombay
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