Sheshadev Sagria
Radiating body
2023
screen-print, photo transfer, drypoint
and drawing
Various mediums that have been utilized to delineate the condition of marginalized people such as Archives, science, academy, news and art operate in the authority of privileged upper caste people hence affecting the construction of contextual information. Detecting other possibilities to challenge the existing contextual information is my primary motive, for which i consider empirical knowledge to be the evidence, as well as attempting to comprehend an act or an utterance without relativism, by using alternative and pseudo-scientific approaches and generating subjective contextual information as a counter-argument.
Recently I participated in a residency that took place in Mumbai an urban city which keeps transforming into Something else each day through the work of immigrant laborers. People from every corner of rural India come to this city for work. Endless research and speculation has been done on this figure - so many facts have been collected - this information builds a wall between onlookers and workers. The research and writing that is accumulated on the immigrant laborer mostly gives information regarding their living condition and the ignorance of the State. This material and knowledge travels only to the other side as a piece of contextual information which limits their identity as a skilled labour body who is living to work and how that body should be preserved with there narrative.
Attempted to collect evidence to counter the popular narrative regarding the immigrant labourer by engaging and interacting with immigrant worker from my village who were working in the Bombay at the time.
Lens as an evidence
I am an onlooker and a friend to a person who works at a construction site. I became a “transferrer” and he became a “messenger”, who sent photographs of the city and the construction site. Observing those images my curiosity and suspicion grew; which led me to preserve and turn it into a book, which compels me and the onlooker to see the city from his lens, a flight view, a view while sitting on the scaffold, around the construction site.
Marks resulted from an Action itself is an evidence
Action Which causes various transformation and changes the vary idea of space, a body that is capable of crawling on the wall, digging a surface, layering a surface, and there are various way of gathering these evidence. I visited the construction site multiple times and collected different forms of marks, light, dust, organs, tools and attempted to preserve it.
Plaster walls are becoming his skin, the workers body is leaving behind its scaffold and radiating like an invisible light. some strange energy is emitting from the body of construction worker which is changing the the atmosphere of construction site, transferring on to walls, tools, and clothes, it was a radiating body after all.
Body that spent its entire day at a construction site could be one of the reasons why its radiating. Bodies who have no choice but to work while being directly exposed to the sun. Scaffold building, wall building, bricklaying, and concrete plastering are hot sun processes. Being exposed to fumes, gases, and vapours from construction material is what makes that body radiate. Will that body radiate if it works in rainy or other season, or at night. The body then might become something else?
It was a space, rooftop, corridor or a resting space which became a space for the installation.
