vidisha.saini@gmail.com http://vidisha-fadescha.

com

Appropriated from Another Performance

Vidisha (V) in conversation with Vidisha (V1) Duration: 40 minutes, May 2013 Performers: Vidisha Saini and Ramzi Hibri

V1: Are you serious? You want me to go crazy? Complicated? Sarcastic? You want me to try be very emotional about it, cry? [...] Ive been engaging in this project, this automatic process of ruin-building. A trace can be built, a trace can be turned into a ruin. Im turning these monuments into a ruin with the process of sarcastically building parodies of them. To affirm that they are constructions and mechanisms of power and control, by reversing the process to make the irony visible. In You Like Mr. Shekhar Im showing you something thats right in front of you even though its not, but its there... V: The tour? V1: The tour and the museum vitrines... its a matter of context. These objects in the library state that they are in Museum Vitrines. They acted as text objects that you can read into. You can only go so far to experience them and find the embedded history. Its a process of compartmentalization that happens within me, I am an archive. History sometimes accumulates while leaving room for things to happen. The previous owners of these items have been massively displaced, they become a ruin. The UNESCO defined that place [ed: Hampi] not historical and ruiny enough. Basically turning history into a form of amusement. V: Do you acknowledge the idea people already have of geographies, are you somehow critiquing these representations? V1: Its finding these spaces in between representation and imagined representation. V: What are you doing with peoples imagination? V1: Putting it to work, un-gentrifying it... Everybody was para-miming but they werent. Its the matter of assuming a false sense of entitlement to know. How could you possibly know? How could I possibly know? V: You have very ambiguous sites in the tour mapBeauty Parlor, Hen, etc. What does that do in the mode of absence? V1: If we are collectively imagining an absent moment, our subjective experience with Beauty Parlors enters the space. It depends on vicarious recognitionvicarious meaning peoples ability to become you. What these museum vitrines have within them is the collective imagination of people displaced. [...] Im also accommodating peoples reluctance to conform to anything. Then making them confront the imaginary. Which then embeds itself in a much more uncanny way... its the queering of a collective imagination. V: Eldorado what does that mean? V1: Eldorado is simply this absolute promise, something universally held in common to be a treasure. The moment you get to it, itll either slip from your hand or in the process of getting it youll slip from your own hands. It speaks to desire, not necessarily to a desire based on lack. The desire that exists continually, which generates desire. Everybody has a different Eldorado, were compelled to find this place in whichever layer of the metaphor youd take it. Love and that desire, only insofar as love is a construction, a projection of yourself onto the other. Eldorado is how you project the world before you to turn it into a means to an attainable or possibly unattainable goal.

vidisha.saini@gmail.com http://vidisha-fadescha.com

V: You say Of Eldorado? V1: Eldorado is a process, its eventuality is impossible. Eldorado doesnt exist, Of Eldorado exists. Its the road to Eldorado that is endless, its about Eldorado. Eldorado remains our clinical dependency for a certain impossible, now more or less gentrified, set of desires. Eldorado erases your own sense of the inherent self-sufficiency. Its kind of an entire history of human suffering. V: Now we switch for Loud & Dirty...? V1: The toilet is an absolutely private spaceits almost like an open confessional, yet public toilets obscure that sense of privacy. It places oneself as a private entity in relation to other bodies within that space. A place where you can anonymously construct or destroy. In ancient Rome, the toilet was like a giant bench and you could sit side by side as a social experience. V: Is the segregation of toilets a product of a certain reading of religious texts, which states that a man and a woman are the only two kinds who have sex with one another? Therefore lets keep them in separate rooms where they dont indulge. V1: Hamam was such a private space for these binary male and female, then it became an avenue of homosexual binaries. It makes you wonder what the implications would be for having unisex bathrooms or a place that could be anything you want. That model applies to queering of this private space and sexualities, an invitation within the private realm. In a time when nothing is fully private yet being anonymous has however become much easier. The culture of toilets depending on which place you are from begins to represent and resonate to more things. In most Arab countries the toilet is a flat surface, and theres a bowl in the ground to use the toilet. V: Its that way at monuments in India as well, I have peed there. V1: Imagine a man squatting. [...] I find objects Im attracted to, usually either dead or dying. Then I put them inside plastic bags if they fit, otherwise I take a picture of them. V: If you talk about death I get turned on... I see this photograph of you in blood and this Zebra in blood... V1: In a military painting technique used in World War II, they would cover the entire ship with these angular shapes. As you are looking at it from a distance, the angle completely obscures the size and shape of the object in terms of perspective. So its a form of camouflage through the skin of distraction or the skin of absorption. Its a tactic of being ungraspable, its impossible to prescribe. The space is continually in transformation... thats how I see the Zebra. If you saw a Zebra running you couldnt tell exactly where, it always feels the stripes are in motion... its like a fluid segment of man. V: At a Zoo in Gaza the Zebras died, then they painted donkeys with Zebra stripes... V1: Really? V: People can now interact with this tamed Zebrathe kids can sit on it and take a picture with it. Which wasnt possible with the Zebra itself, since the Zebra is more ferocious than the donkey, which has been domesticated. V1: You catch on to these things, which become physical iconographies. They become potent statements embedded in the magical unconscious of our imagination. Im using a Zebra because what Im trying to say is very Zebra.