To the right of the QR code, there is a large, rectangular bench with a back, upholstered in a light blue fabric where you can sit while listening to this track.
Hi, my name is Monica, one of the three members of Raqs Media Collective, along with Jeebesh and Shuddhabrata. In front of you is a large, multimedia installation we created called ‘Thirst/Trishna’.
You can find it on the large low plinth to the right of the tactile line. The work has multiple sculptural and digital elements. The metallic sculptural forms evoke the form of the step-well. These are subterranean structures emerging onto the ground, and these have been built across the Indian subcontinent to capture and store rainwater. Stepwells can range massively in size. Even in small villages you'll find tiny ones. But some of the larger stepwells, especially in desert lands, are spectacular. Spectacular and terrifying because they're so deep. They are often built in a square spiral, descending step by step down to the water at the bottom, which can be up to 100 feet down.
The back panel is covered in a silver step wallpaper. Projected onto it are fragments of sky, a patchwork evoking many skies, shot as if you were at the bottom of a stepwell looking up. Outlines of airplanes pass overhead, crisscrossing the world.
In front of that is the crowd of sculptures, and embedded onto some of those are multiple screens.
Four of these screens show different film fragments.
You will glimpse: A stepwell shot from above. It has square stone sides with sets of steps every few feet leading down from one level to the next. The camera descends towards the bottom where a circular well encloses a square of green grass with a pool of blue water in the centre. I love this mix of square and circle in the design; it is a spiral pattern that connects to bigger stories – after all spiral nautilus fossils have been found on top of mountains…
You will see:
• Blue skies and agitated waters.
• The geometric architecture of the stepwell, the stone bathed in honey coloured evening sunlight. Steps and colonnades rise up and down in mesmerizing repeating patterns.
• Lush green forests and rainfall, shot from unexpected angles.
• Shards of pottery in heaps of ash.
• The shores of mangroves.
• And much more.
The last screen shows newspaper cuttings painted over with blackboard ink on which are overlain white schematic drawings. Snippets of written poetry appear occasionally. Clay, rivers, bodies, a moon-well, and forests are all listened to, and spoken to. Thirst, and the possibility of its slaking, draw fluid connections from poetry, myth, folklore, considerations on climate change and the geo-politics of disputed rivers.
When you sit under the overhead speaker, you can hear Shuddha’s voice, reading in Sanskrit. My voice is the English translation – and what you are listening to is a fragment from The Book of the Forest, in the Ramayana, where Lord Rama’s wife Sita has been kidnapped and the trees, the forest and its creatures feel an enormous disquiet.
The overall effect is perhaps dizzying first, but all these fragmentary elements come together to form a greater whole. A mosaic that helps you understand a relationship with thirst. As one descends the steps down the well, desiring, needing the water at the bottom, one is sharing an experience with countless others who have taken these steps before. Thirst is something that hovers above us all - a kind of haunting by life. Stepwells are also reservoirs of memory, etched in watermarks on stone.
We created Trishna to explore the idea of thirst across time, across place. These emotions and sensations and qualities in human nature have existed across all our history.
All living beings eat differently, but everything that lives, slakes thirst with water; from amoebae to birds to leopards to schoolchildren, from pigs to monkeys to flocks of birds, to a woman waiting at the water’s edge at a step-well, everything alive knows the same tasteless taste. The taste of water.
In South Asia, access to water has reflected inequalities of caste. People outside caste hierarchy have often been denied access to drinking water from village wells. The first public agitation against the horror of caste was also a movement to reclaim the right to drink water. This was the famous ‘Mahad Resistance’, catalysed by Dr. Ambedkar in 1927.
Sadly, many stepwells now are dead or treated as vestiges. The ones in Delhi are often dry, polluted, uncared for. This becomes a poignant reflection which connects how we think and live with what we need. The politics of Water is going to be the politics of the future. When you think about being parched - when you will feel the dust and the heat of the land - our fragility will become inescapable.
This is the end of Stop 4.