Last January

October 30th, 2009

Am looking back through books. One page is about the symposium at NIAS ages ago. I had been trying to find the presentation that Shiv Visvanathan gave and I think I’ve found it. It was wonderful, about the imagination of science and the imagination of democracy. Here in England, its truly difficult to get anyone to pay attention to India, to what India might be, to what science and technology might seem like there, to what people think. England is truly insular and its hard to figure out what’s useful about that.

The talks were inspiring and I thanked Shiv Visvanathan in the car park afterwards and shook his hand and some time I want to find him again and talk to him. But after the talk also people didn’t want to talk and in the questions, Yashas asked all the artists to put up their hands and there were a surprising number and somehow it seemed that there was a disconnect with what was being said on the stage and the experiential research practices of these Bangalore-based artists. So in my book I wrote:

“but everyone kept the safe hierarchy of the stage and the auditorium and the microphone. No one realised that to achieve what they wanted, they would have to do the stupidly simple thing of stepping off the stage into a hallway or canteen or garden or street.”

Then there’s something that he must have said in the talk:

“For every poetics of Innovation we need a theory of waste”

and then on the next page:

“The stars are beautiful because of a flower one cannot see…”

That’s something the Little Prince said.

elsewhere, rhetoric, imagination, India | Comments | Trackback