In February of this year, I wrote this paragraph:
I cannot help but be plagued by visions of the diversity in this infernal night. On this sleepless night, I find loud communal chants, tears, wailing, forced words and other forms of impositions as bright, blinding images, recurring across the different geographies of life. These are searing images, and our first exposure to this authoritarian world. These are strong feelings, stirred keenly by a feeling that entrenches us further. What naturally follows, is that there are equally candid feelings felt by the foot soldiers of authoritarian forces.
This was in the run up to making and exhibiting the Constitutional Observer. As I look back and trace it’s genesis: I realise that it coincides with my wide-mouthed introduction to political lenses of observation. To say wide-mouthed is to say: that a lot of things were happening at once, In the run up to the 2024 elections that were extremely worrying and I experienced the scale of it all for the first time.
Writing the questions, in swathes of different contexts
“Who should we pray to?” is the first question that I stumbled upon. I wrote in bunches, each bunch being defined by the tenor and nature of what I was exposed to that day or what I read. A friend of mine had a copy of “The Country Without a Post Office” by Agha Shahid Ali. That was the first few pieces of poetry that I’ve felt innately moved by, coinciding with other reading that similarly moved me. Agha Shahid Ali provoked questions like:
From where may poetry arrive?
Why do we need the benovelent?
Where do we seek refuge?
Who must we provide refuge for?
Where do we write letter to?
Whose kisses need lisences?
Which lives need papers?
Which houses are addresses?
Which addresses are houses?
Questioning things that are almost stitched into us as children
One visitor told me of how her child (of somewhere around highschool age) was asked to give a speech on Independance day (or republic day) and her child came up to her tell that she did not understand what patriotism was. I found it profound that first: the highschool kid had the environment to say that out aloud. and second: that such a question could exist at all. I did not expect such criticality from myself or others when I was that age. Nor do I expect it now. Where and how is this curiosity at something so constructed and stuffed as patriotism found?
These questions also treated the ‘I’ or the family ‘us’ as the closest unit. These are personal questions that do explicitly carry messages. Many conversations were with people from across the political aisle.
Many of the conversations at the exhibit where of how the questions covered so much ground, provoking connections by the sole existence of the sequence and the neighbourhood of contexts. You can read the questions here
Going forward
The Observer is not simply a search engine
In many conversations that I have with people who have much to say about the Observer: It often comes out as a search engine, something that exists to find information. I often hit a roadblock there, since the evolving vision for the Observer is not one of exclutionary-digital-access only, but one of discussion and debate in the real world. These questions are meant to provoke, and they did. I wonder how they would seem in other languages, exhibited or placed in other places and with more diversity of questions.