What is this city that conjures dreams and generates voices that cry in protest? What is this place – of arrival, dwelling, and departure? How do we walk this city, wrapped in layers of remembering and erasures? We wonder what words and texts are ‘not in news’ and yet, are audible in choric unison?
By navigating Mrinal Sen’s real, imagined, and cinematic city, “Speech Acts”, by Amritah and Madhuja, attempts to reimagine the liminal and shifting city, which is volatile as well as a place of struggle, movement, and action. It responds to Sen’s themes and cinematic gestures to create newer expressions of the city’s every day, its people, striving and thriving middle-classesand labouring bodies – with fists held high in anger and exhilaration.
The works are layered with multiple utterances, speaking about ruins and historical relics, marked by transitions and desires of its inhabitants. People, workers, walkers and their choric scream, also the streets, footpaths, lanes, by-lanes, neighbourhoods, as well as manifold realities and fairy tales, build the urban rubric of the city which unfolds here -- in paper, paint, and in audio-visual forms.
