Presentation at Mami

From PhalkeFactory

YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS TO DREAM?

Horn (5 years, 3 months): You know what it is to dream? - Yes. It's when you see people.- Where is the dream?- In the smoke- What smoke?- The smoke that comes from the bedclothes. -Where do dreams come from?- From here( pointing to the stomach). - Then how is it that they are in the bedclothes while you are dreaming?- Because you know it's like that. (PIAGET)

[1] the mist over brahmagiri

Saurin.jpg


Kamal mum workshop.jpg

Ganesh Kumbhar story

THE FLYING PRINCE

The Phalke project was able to be about the imagination because it worked with material. (litanies from books had to be made our synapses, a diving board we might jump off from and find- a new way of sticking two pieces of paper together. ) A history of the phalke project itself would yield a history of a diversity of- material processes. ( for later- phalke's life too- his involvement in processes, which themselves are - like a history of the coming of cinema) Once upon a time, there was a scrap book, the filmaker's dhundiraj phalke's life story was made words of, and alongside parallel timelines of technology and history, was painstakingly typed by Priya, and against the long rectangle of those typed words on paper, Kamal had tried to mine individual words- turtle for Kashyap in the underwater womb of the mother. Parsing words like walnuts, or listening to their puns, synonyms, how a word dipped in water at any one point might create a ripple further downstream- any thing more that the material of the typewritten words could yield. And brochures brought out at art galleries in town, always far from where almost all artists working in film lived..were brought back across bombay trains to recover images from them, and the images were recombined to make, words maybe. So the face of 8888 pasted over a print of Saraswati generated by the Ravi varma press- did what language does- gathers two meanings to pound a new word out of them. That was still two people writing and breaking the words and joining the pictures and then putting them side by side..

And slowly from that book

i in a world you know nothing about, to dream, you must first find material, walk by it, river shore in nasik, stare into faces reading your words through the glasses of your camera, stick walls up with pages of a book you stuck into being, wait by rectangular windows in your long drawer like rooms in Baroda as the rain soaks the banyans and the stone cats in the fine arts courtyard, will someone be writing a story for you? always, the writing it with presence- for presence- the making too