From dak at sarai.net Wed Nov 2 15:39:19 2005 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Wed, 02 Nov 2005 15:39:19 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] NOVEMBER 2005 Message-ID: <4368904F.7090402@sarai.net> ************************************************************************************************************ ***************************************** SARAI NEWSLETTER NOVEMBER 2005 *********************************** ************************************************************************************************************ Dear All, There are many events planned at Sarai this November. The month kicks off with a book-reading and discussion with Samit Basu, author of the Simoqin Prophecies, followed by the Bare Acts Picnic in Lodhi Gardens. For friends in Bangalore, do keep a look out for the programme of the World Information City meet in mid-November. We also have two new media art presentations/discussions, the first by Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewskion the 'Seekers' project, and the second on 'Inner Ecologies' by Malcolm Levy. This month's film curation, 'Cars', begins with Ruchir Joshi's recently completed film, 'A Mercedes' for Ashish. We hope many of you will be able to make your way to Sarai. A very happy Diwali and Id Mubarak to all! Warmly, Aarti Sethi [Outreach] +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ [[CONTENTS]] EVENTS AND WORKSHOPS 1. Bookreading @ Sarai: The Simoqin Prophecies, Samit Basu 2. Seminars @ Sarai: (Northern) Lights, (Handheld) Camera,(Re) Action: Filming the Arctic - Michelle H. Raheja 3. Presentation @ Sarai: 'Inner Ecologies' - Malcolm Levy + Ravi Agarwal, 'Seekers' Project - Josephine Starrs + Leon Cmielewski 4. The 'Bare Acts' Picnic: Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts discussion, Lodhi Gardens, Delhi FILM 5. Film @ Sarai: Cars RESEARCH 6. Call for Applications: Student Stipendships for Research on The City CONFERENCES 7. World Information City - 14 - 19 November 2005, Bangalore +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ [[EVENTS AND WORKSHOPS]] ==================== Book-reading @ Sarai ==================== 5:30 pm, Thursday, 3 November 2005 Interface Zone Sarai-CSDS We invite you for an evening of coffee and conversation with Samit Basu, author of The Simoqin Prophecies. Samit will read from the book and discuss the 'The Manticore's Secret', the forthcoming book in the trilogy. Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Anand Vivek Taneja will be discussants for the evening. "The Simoqin Prophecies/ is at once classic SFF and subtle spoof, featuring scantily clad centauresses, flying carpets, pink trolls, belly dancers and homicidal rabbits. Monty Python meets the Ramayana, Alice in Wonderland meets The Lord of the Rings and Robin Hood meets The Arabian Nights in this novel - a breathtaking ride through a world peopled by different races and cultures from mythology and history..." [Samit Basu is a writer and sci-fci enthusiast. He also works as a columnist for The Telegraph, Calcutta, and as a freelance scriptwriter, journalist and reviewer. He is the author of 'The Simoqin Prophecies', published in January 2004 by Penguin India. The second in the trilogy, 'The Manticore's Secret', is slated for release December 2005.] ================================================== Seminar @ Sarai: Urban Culture and Politics Series ================================================== (Northern) Lights, (Handheld) Camera,(Re) Action: Filming the Arctic Michelle H. Raheja 3.30 pm, Wednesday, 23 November 2005. Shot entirely on location in and around the village of Igloolik, Canada, The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat), the first Inuit feature-length film, was directed by Zacharias Kunuk and produced by Igloolik Isuma Productions, Canada’s first Inuit independent production company. The film is set in the period prior to contact with Europeans, employs subtitles to translate Inuktitut dialogue, situates features of the narrative within a shamanistic framework, and features an all-Inuit cast, it would be tempting for spectators to view The Fast Runner as an ethnographic film that offers a non-politicized, purely local, National Geographic-style portrayal of Inuit culture. In this presentation, I argue that while The Fast Runner resembles visual anthropology structurally, it also critiques the nexus of salvage anthropology and ethnographic film by employing some of the structural elements that have defined ethnographic film history to particularly Inuit ends. By placing The Fast Runner in dialogue with an older film, The Silent Enemy (1930), that also centers on a love story between two Native American characters and creates a sense of the ‘authentic’ by using translated indigenous language in a pre-European settlement setting, as well as indigenous and contemporary theory, I demonstrate how Kunuk’s film departs from earlier attempts at fusing the genres of narrative and ethnographic film. I call this use and critique of ethnofilmic conventions “visual sovereignty.” [Michelle H. Raheja works in Native American Studies, particularly literature and film, and her research, writing, and pedagogy center on issues of indigenous visual culture, sovereignty, nationalism, and self/commuo-biography. She is co-author of a forthcoming edited volume on ethnic impostors, ‘Pretending to Be Me: Ethnic Transvestism and Cross-Writing,’ and author of a forthcoming book, ‘Visual Sovereignty: Beads, Buckskins, and Redfacing in Native American Film,’.] ==================== Presentation @ Sarai ==================== Inner Ecologies Malcolm Levy + Ravi Agarwal 3:30 pm, Wednesday 8 November 2005 Seminar room, Sarai-CSDS Inner Ecologies looks at the artist in their environment. The New Forms Festival 05 Screening Series focuses on the idea of inner ecologies within our world. Environments exist in numerous forms; from the trees and rivers of the forest to the urban landscape across the globe. The mind reflects off its own inner movement. Selected pieces to 'Inner Ecologies' will address different notions of an environment, ranging from cultural, social, physical, experimental, and virtual in its nature. Malcolm Levy will screen the 'Inner Ecologies' Series - a set of video and film works. This will be followed by a discussion with Ravi Agarwal, noted enviromentalist and photographer, who will be the discussant for the session. Works to be screened include: Dorsal Ventral Asymmetry : Karolina Sobecka (Los Angeles, U.S.) Biological Narrative 1 thru 5: Timothy Weaver (Denver, U.S.) 9:12 A Synaesthesia : Will Tompkins (Ann Arbor, U.S. : Vidfest) 4:14 Lake: Kevin Bolster (Vancouver, Canada) 5:38 Grau: Robert Seidel (Germany) 10:40 Recode : Lasse Raa (Norway) 6:50 Spacer: Guy Roland (Vancouver, Canada) 3:01 Don’t touch me when I start to feel safe/ 4:31 : Brigitta Boedenauer (Austria) *************** The Seekers Project: Presentation and Discussion Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski 11:00 am, Thursday, 3 November 2005 Seminar room Sarai-CSDS Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski are Australian media artists who have worked together on several projects including Trace, an interactive installation exploring biometrics, Bio-Tek Kitchen a computer game patch, Dream Kitchen an interactive stop-motion animation, and Floating Territories a game art installation shown at ISEA2004, Helsinki, and Beijing International New Media Exhibition, 2005. http://lx.sysx.org Starrs and Cmielewski use play in their work as a strategy for engaging with the social and political contradictions inherent in contemporary society. Their interest in new technology is fueled by a mixture of skepticism (who is excluded from technotopia and why would anyone want to live there anyway?) and enthusiasm for the playful possibilities of new media. During their 3-month residency at Sarai they are working on their current project, Seeker, investigating personal territory, mapping, conflict commodities and human displacement. Viewers can engage with the interactive part of the work individually by contributing their personal family migration history through a playful mapping interface, where making a contribution allows access to a dynamic rendering of all accumulated maps. ================================= Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts Picnic ================================= Lodhi Gardens, Delhi 3:30 pm, Saturday, 5 November 2005 From this November onwards we are trying to intiate a monthly informal discussion around particular texts from Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts. The idea is to get different people to respond to texts from their particular locations and perspectives, and share this with a group of interested interlocuters. Each month we will consider a different set of texts grouped around a broad theme. The first picnic will be held on the 5th of November at 4:00 pm in Lodhi gardens. It will be an informal gathering and the texts are grouped around the theme of gender and sexuality. We will meet at the gate outside the India International Centre. You can also ask for directions and so on by calling Aarti at 9810105158. Do bring along tea/coffee and fruit to help the conversation along ! Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Aarti Sethi, Gautam Bhan, Monica Mody and Sunalini Kumar will discuss the following texts from the reader which attempt to explore the fraught relationship between the law and realms of intimacy, sexual labour, pornography, movements for the assertion of sexual rights. The texts can be downloaded in pdf format at: Negotiating Territory: Ateya Khorakiwala, discussant Gautam Bhan http://www.sarai.net/journal/05_pdf/07/04_ateya.pdf Womanhood Laid Bare: Alice Albinia, discussant Sunalini Kumar http://www.sarai.net/journal/05_pdf/10/01_alice.pdf Representing a Woman's Story: Hirakari Hori, discussant Monica Mody http://www.sarai.net/journal/05_pdf/10/05_hikari.pdf Sex Workers Manifesto: Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Samiti, discussant Shuddhabrata Sengupta http://www.sarai.net/journal/05_pdf/13/03_sex_worker.pdf Judicial Extract: discussant Aarti Sethi http://www.sarai.net/journal/05_pdf/10/04_cabaret.pdf +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ [[FILM]] We are happy to announce that film screenings curated by the Sarai programme will also be screened at the Khoj artists collective. This marks a collaborative initiative between Sarai and Khoj. This new series of screenings will run on Thursdays at Khoj at 6:00 pm and on Fridays at Sarai-CSDS at the usual time, 4:30 pm. These screenings have been an integral part of Sarai's programming and public profile for five years. The screenings have been a space for people from diverse backgrounds - academics and students, practitioners, artists and researchers – to converse with each other about the way in which films speak to the times that they were made in, and to the times we live in. We hope that with this initiative a new public will find the Sarai screenings, and that Sarai will find a new public, bringing new energies and approaches into talking and thinking about films. Hoping to see many of you, and many good films. films @ khoj – Thursdays, 6.00 pm Khoj Studios S-17 . Khirki Extension. (Near Sai Baba Temple) New Delhi-17 Call:91-11-55655874\73 www.khojworkshop.org khojinteract at gmail.com films @ Sarai – Fridays, 4.30 pm ===================================== Film @ Sarai: October – November 2005 ===================================== The cinema and the automobile were both born a hundred years ago. Each brought unparalleled freedom to explore, and each compressed time and space. - David Cronenberg This November we continue Sarai's occasional series of film curations on remembering technologies – both iconic and everyday – which characterize the 'modernity' we inhabit. Taking off from the last film in last month's curation, Ruchir Joshi's 'A Mercedes for Ashish', this month the focus of our curation is Cars. As David Cronenberg's quote illustrates, cars and cinema have a unique relationship. And as our cities become increasingly transformed by the imagination of the automobile, our curation seeks to bring together the various ways in which cars have been remembered and represented in films – as vehicles of freedom, as markers of individuality, as instruments which disconnect us from reality, as erotic extensions of the human body…. *** || Video Game || directed by Vipin Vijay || Oye Taxi! || directed by Karan Singh || A Mercedes for Ashish || directed by Ruchir Joshi 10 November, Khoj 11 November, Sarai VIDEO GAME directed by Vipin Vijay Documentary, 2005, 30 minutes A complex video journey on/in a motorcar, the quintessential cultural interchange of modern times where a picture of the road emerges. Invoking mythic themes of questing and searching and serving as a map of current cultural desires, dreams, and fears; the film juxtaposes 'on the road' shots with NG shots of found footage of a B/W filmic exercise. Both the motion of the car and that of the celluloid have been put in the cauldron for an unanticipated convergence, to reveal the latent physicality of memory. It begins its Fetch-Decode-Execute cycle as the subject enters "suburbs of hell", the psycho-geographical zone in transition where the soft technologies of the interior (the body) and the hard technologies of the exterior (the environment) are thrown together in collision and almost surgically cut each other up… OYE TAXI! Directed by Karan Singh Documentary, 2002, 28 minutes Oye Taxi! is an inquisitive look at urban life in India today through theeyes of Mumbai's taxi drivers. Coming from far-flung parts of the country to make a better life in the city, this 55,000-strong body of people represents in a way both the old and the new faces of urbanised India. While taxi drivers are in way icons of Mumbai, they have been marginalized by the success of the big city. Life for them means carrying other people's hopes and success. This has, however, not dampened their humour and their optimistic view on the city itself. Their stories and nonchalance make them a breed apart. Oye Taxi! is fast-paced and colourful, capturing the essence of Mumbai, of life on its streets, and the many different attitudes on display, some forced, others natural. The film is free-flowing and unstructured, allowing the taxi drivers to tell their own story. A MERCEDES FOR ASHISH directed by Ruchir Joshi Docuementray, 2005, A cinematic document of simultaneous degradations of human space and dignity, images of how roads, walls, constructions-in-progress, ganda nalas, billboards, all in some way attack the human body. *** || Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi || 17 November,Thursday Khoj 18 November, Friday Sarai CHALTI KANAM GAADI directed by Satyen Bose Fiction, 1958, 173 minutes Three brothers manage a car repair shop and an eccentric jalopy. The eldest is a misogynist who believes that women jinx cars as well as love lives, and wants his brothers to keep away. One night a rain drenched woman brings her car in to be repaired… and what ensues is one of the funniest comedies ever made, with all sorts of hilarious situations – a boxing match where the referee gets knocked out, crazy detective routines, and an out of this world car race *** ||Crash|| 24 November, Thursday, Khoj 25 November, Friday, Sarai CRASH directed by David Cronenberg Fiction, 1996, 100 minutes The immediate subject matter of Crash is the strange lure of the auto collision, provoking as it does the human fascination with death and the tendency to eroticize danger. Television commercial producer James Ballard and his wife Catherine have constructed a baroque marital sex life that is emotionally detached and relies heavily on their shared knowledge of each other's adulterous affairs. When Ballard is in a near-fatal car accident with Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter), he reawakens to the possibilities of his own body, and is drawn into an exploration of the links between danger, sex and death. The Ballards and Dr. Remington become involved with Vaughan, a renegade scientist obsessed with the erotic power of the crash, as witnessed by his head-to-toe scars. Vaughan introduces them to a strange crash-survivor subculture, a de facto cult of which he is the high priest… **** All screenings at Khoj at 5.30 pm, Thursdays All screenings at Sarai at 4.30 pm, Fridays The programme is subject to last minute changes. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ [[RESEARCH]] ============================== Student Stipendships programme ============================== Call for Proposals: Sarai-CSDS Student Stipendship for Research on The City 2005-06. Sarai invites applications for short term studentships to facilitate research on urban life in South Asia. Candidates may be from any discipline and should be enrolled in a Masters, M.Phil or Ph.D programme in India. You are required to send a one page abstract (indicating the scope, nature and approach of proposed research) along with your C.V. Candidates who have already undertaken research may also send a sample copy of their writing. Indicative themes include: urban histories, architecture and spatial transformations, planning, environment, labour, economy, community life, memory and narratives of the city, literature and urbanism, cinema and the city, visual culture, public space and media practices. Selected candidates will be expected to participate in two workshops (February and June 2006) to discuss their research after which they will present a final paper in September 2006. The stipendship amount is Rs.15,000. Sarai will also take care of travel, boarding and lodging for researchers attending the workshops. Deadline for Applications: 21 November 2005 Applications may be sent to: Sadan Jha Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 10054 Ph: 23960040, 23942199 For further deatials and enquiries, contact: sadan at sarai.net +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ [[CONFERENCES]] ====================== World Information City ====================== World Information City 14 -19 November 2005, Bangalore World Information City - Bangalore,(WIC-B) is a week long event jointly organized by Netbase (Vienna), Alternative Law Forum (Bangalore), Mahiti (Bangalore), The Waag Society (Amsterdam) and Sarai-CSDS (Delhi). WIC - B is one of a series of events and processes titled World Information.Org - initiated by the Netbase (Vienna) in partnership with organizations and initiatives in different parts of the world to focus attention on cultural, social and political aspects of information in the contemporary world. Previous 'editions' of World Information.Org have taken place in Vienna, Brussels, Amsterdam, Belgrade and Novi Sad For more details, see http://world-information.org/wio World Information City brings together artists projects, exhibitions, city walks, workshops, and a conference that features panels, discursive and research based presentations and conversations on 'Information' as a social and political reality. The event hopes to speak not only to the broad themes of information, society, politics and history but also to the concrete realities of 'World Information Cities' such as Bangalore WIC-B is a project under the 'Towards a Culture of Open Networks' collaborative network (Waag, Sarai-CSDS, Netbase) and is supported by the EU-India Economic and Cross Cultural Programme. A full programme along with conference details will be posted soon. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ END OF NEWSLETTER The Newsletter of the Sarai Programme, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054, www.sarai.net Info: dak at sarai.net To subscribe: send a blank email to newsletter-request at sarai.net with subscribe in the subject header. Directions to Sarai: We are ten minutes from Delhi University. Nearest bus stop: IP college or Exchange Stores. You can also take the Metro - get off at Civil Lines station. See Calendar and Newsletter online: http://www.sarai.net/calendar/newsletter.htm