On Heterotopias: Concluding Panel Discussion at VAICA’s Fields of Vision

The final week of VAICA’s festival Fields of Vision revolved around “Urban Heterotopias” and was available to view online from 12 December to 18 December 2021. The format of the festival was such that each weekly thematic was bookended by a public discussion featuring some of the artists whose work had been showcased through the week, in conversation with a critic. The concluding panel discussion for the final week thus included the artists Amitesh Grover, Babu Eshwar Prasad and Sheba Chhachhi, whose works Data Messiahs, On the Road, and Moving the City respectively were screened through the week. Moderated by philosopher-anthropologist Sarover Zaidi, the panel explored the concept of “heterotopia” as proposed by Michel Foucault in terms of a third/other space, and how it was envisioned in the context of each video work.

Babu Eshwar Prasad’s On the Road (2021) deploys footage from the artist’s archives to suture together an experience of being on the road, in relation to changing technologies of cinema. Prasad’s work evolved in the time of the pandemic, as a result of being housebound and having the opportunity to revisit his own video archives—much of which was on miniDV tapes. In the process of converting it to digital and watching the footage, Prasad was transported to another time and place. For the artist, the experience of being on the road and the apparatus of the camera through the motif of the view-finder—that produces a particular way of seeing/ perceiving—together generate the heterotopic space as one that is immediately ambiguous and simultaneously personal.

Amitesh Grover’s video Data Messiahs (2017) was part of a longer durational project titled Back to Work with collaborator Arnika Ahldag, commissioned by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. Shot in an IT company, it features two employees as they go through the motions of initiating new entrants to the digital capital workforce through an induction workshop. While Grover spoke about digital capital itself as a heterotopia in many ways; in the context of his work, it was the process of creating that offered heterotopic possibilities. Coming from a background in theatre and performance, the space/time of the encounter between the camera and the performing bodies through a defined choreography highlighted the absurd, constituting a heterotopia.

Sheba Chhachhi’s work Moving the City (2016) follows a young woman as she performs different gestures in the city of Delhi. Over the course of the work, the protagonist occupies space through something as simple as walking on a road to more complex movements such as balancing, with one foot in the air, while on an escalator. In a bid to (re)claim the city, the body becomes the site of heterotopia as it exists through negotiations with gendered spaces of the city.

Chhachhi, in the discussion, brought up the question of whether any of the works really constituted heterotopias, since none of them had a destabilising effect. In response to this, Zaidi referenced the notion of “seepage” as defined by Raqs Media Collective. They conceive of it as “…those acts that ooze through the pores of the outer surfaces of structures into available pores within the structure, and result in a weakening of the structure itself.” In this manner, such destabilisation of structures/institutions happens through slow acts over time. Time thus emerged as the key vector to think of the constitution of heterotopias as real spaces—even if existing momentarily. For Chhachhi, “Space has lost its radical potential, it is now time inserted into space that can create some kind of possibility.” Grover brought up an anecdote from the time of working on the performance, in which he asked one of the company employees if there was any space/time that was not under surveillance. As a result of this query, he was introduced to an employee who had made a list of times on certain floors where no CCTV cameras were pointing. This act of carving space through counter surveillance, undertaken during times of “leisure” within the corporate schedule, thus became a heterotopic disruption.

Perhaps it is such acts of heterotopic disruption that the festival catalogue hinted at by referring to the curated works as contemplating “…the urban condition as well as actions that consistently rework the landscapes of our everyday encounters.” After looking back at the month-long curation of video works under Fields of Vision, perhaps we can extend Zaidi’s concluding provocation/question of what a heterotopia is/ can be—“Is heterotopia a time? A body? A language? A silence? A film? A photograph? Or a Zoom panel?”—to also ask, is it an online video art festival?

To read about the works featured as part of VAICA’s festival Fields of Vision, please click here, here, here and here.

To learn more about the curatorial impetus behind Fields of Vision, please click here and here.