This solo performance portrays the voice of everyday objects owned by an Indian citizen. By reading the directions, precautions and random warnings printed on the object reflect the precarity of political, cultural and social existence of an ordinary Indian citizen. This performance is part of a series titled ‘Thus spake nonhuman’ performed by m r vishnuprasad.
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This performance was an experimental act of creating poetry using litter and discarded printed or handwritten paper. This solo performance was part of a curatorial exercise by Raq’s Media Collective titled ‘When does curatorial work end’, co-curated by Sudheesh Kottembram. The performer was given the liberty of choosing their modus operandi to create poetry. During an evening stroll through the JNU campus, we collected litter lying around like ATM slips, advertisements, posters, pencils, filaments of an incandescent bulb, safety pins, rocks, feathers, a lock without a key etc. I pasted these collected materials on A4 size sheets and read aloud the contents on the paper. Resembling archaeological practices, these discarded texts and materials were found, preserved and performed as poetry. The final part of the performance included presenting the collected objects to the audience by mentioning each object as different lines of a poem. Here, poetry crosses the language and the performer enables the human and nonhuman entities to appear like lines of a never-ending poem. Like, a non-written anthology, the objects and the contents on the papers came alive as poetry.
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While mentioning the evolution of human beings, Vladimir Nabokov uses the binomial nomenclature, Homo poeticus instead of Homo sapiens. According to Nabokov, Homo poeticus inaugurated the existence of a species engaged in the meaning-making without which sapiens could have been evolved. I selected the cave ecosystem in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus as the venue for this poetry performance. JNU campus is situated on the 1.5 billion-year-old Aravalli, one of the ancient mountain ranges older than the Himalayas. The cave ecosystem of JNU is a quartzite rock formation where stone age tribes used to make tools. Archaeologists have discovered Stone Age factories along the hills, providing evidence for the widespread production of tools. In this solo performance, the poet recites his poem with his nude body to represent the cave life. The performance seemed like an ‘ecological soliloquy’ as the poet recited the poems to himself and the non-human environment surrounding the cave.
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