Come friends and meet FALAK VASA from Kolkata and Chicago! I am at a loss for words to adequately present this upcoming adventure-performance-lecures. Jain cosmology, western cartography, 3D animation song and dance promise it’s going to be great fun!
Programm BEARDED FLAMINGOS is an exercise in passing, migration and camouflage through embodiment and recitation. While the 3D bearded flamingo performs on the screen, the physically present bearded flamingo, I, perform off it. Yet, the two blur into each other with a merging of the text on screen with the text spoken aloud. One becomes the other of the self, alluding to a hybrid identity that refuses to conform. I take up the role of the bearded flamingo by wearing a latex flamingo beak. The text is recited aloud, and moments of stillness and silence are used to shift focus to and from the video playing behind me from a projector. The video also uses text as a sound and visual element. The bearded flamingo performs when I recite. I perform when the bearded flamingo recites. The performative gestures are simple but poetic, stillness for camouflage, folding paper planes for migration, poking for passing and so on. DOUBLE-DIAMOND DECOLONIZER is an ongoing project series that explores relationships between Jain cosmology and Western cartography, oral and written pedagogies, my mother and I. Jain cosmology holds that the shape of the universe is a double-diamond. Using this shape as an epistemological tool that is always offered, but never translated, always resisting, but never opposing, always inviting but never letting in, the double-diamond decolonizes through unapologetic refusal and ingenious trickery.