Language is Migrant: Natasha Ginwala on Hybrid Conditions of Belonging

Recorded on 30 July 2021.

Like most island nations, Sri Lanka invites both isolation and exchange. This makes it an interesting site for Colomboscope, an interdisciplinary arts festival that is centred in the nation’s capital. Its Artistic Director Natasha Ginwala—who joins us on the podcast today—is determined not to neglect the rest of the country and to sustain artistic communities through the year. “This (Colomboscope’s) ten-day cultural frenzy is perhaps not the most comprehensive way to build cultural infrastructure,” she says. She connects the residencies as part of the event to a longer history of artist-run spaces in Sri Lanka, including Theertha.

Sri Lanka, with its strategic location in the Indian Ocean, has long been well connected with the rest of South Asia. For the festival, Ginwala said that they followed the artists’ lead on connections and collaborations, keeping in mind the proximities that extend beyond the subcontinent in many ways. Expanding beyond their work in Sri Lanka, Colomboscope has also been engaged in discursive and exhibition-based collaborations with art practices across the region, including an exhibition by Festival Curator Anushka Rajendran at Chobi Mela in January 2021.

The theme of this edition is Language is Migrant, inspired by an eponymous poem-manifesto by the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña. Thinking through a text by inviting artists to interpret it and give body to it—while being anchored in Sri Lanka—has shaped this year’s works. Many of the participating Sri Lankan artists have witnessed first-hand the civil war and its fallout, and Ginwala says that with the theme of language—both invented and suppressed—the artists and curators wanted to think through what it means to recompose one’s sense of place. She says, “The question of language is not just about one’s mother tongue versus a majority tongue; there are a lot of aspects of having witnessed trauma and of having faced erasure.”

^{(Featured Image: Installation view of Link Road at Chobi Mela 2021. Palash Bhattacharjee. Dhaka, 2021. Photograph by Farhad Rahman.)}

The ASAP Cast series is supported by the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.