MR Vishnuprasad sits atop a column, on the central gallery area at Durbar Hall, whereas his viewers gathers round him in a semicircle. He is about to current ‘Footnotes’, a efficiency based mostly on tidal flooding in Kochi. There aren’t any props in sight, apart from a visible of a graph projected on the wall behind him, and no fanfare.
How is a efficiency artist going to sort out a posh environmental concern in a gallery setting? As Vishnuprasad begins his narration, the questions start to dissolve. He opens the piece by recounting a recurring nightmare — of on a regular basis family objects floating about him. Broaching the difficulty gently, he builds a gentle narrative round tidal flooding, bringing truth, information and actual voices to the fore.
“It is the daily reality of people living in Kochi’s coastal areas — how they deal with the quiet terror of the rising waters that refuse to leave their homes and how their lives now are defined by these tidal surges,” says Vishnuprasad, whose inquiry into climate change — climate injustices and ecological grief led him to the mission.
He visited the regions in Kochi affected by saline water intrusion to know and expertise it first hand. No longer a seasonal phenomenon, tidal flooding has pressured a number of households in Kochi’s coastal belt, together with Vypin, Edavanakkad, Enikkara, Edakochi, and Thanthonithuruth, to desert their properties. Though native collectives such because the Edakochi Janakeeya Samithi have been combating for the trigger, their plight continues.
MR Vishnuprasad acting at Durbar Hall, Kochi
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Special Arrangement
Vishnuprasad gathered video footage of flooded properties from the archives of the Edakochi Janakeeya Samithi, and collaborating with video artist Akarsh Karunakaran, mixed the footage with poetry, narrative textual content and reside speech by residents of Edakochi to create his ‘lecture performance’. “I wanted real voices to be represented. It is their reality,” he provides.
‘Footnotes’ has been conceived as a lecture efficiency, a comparatively new type of efficiency artwork combining components of a standard lecture with that of efficiency artwork. The piece gives area for the scientific and the inventive worlds to satisfy, the place truth blends with inventive expression. Vishnuprasad’s personal journey has been by means of these seemingly disparate worlds. With a masters in Environmental Science, and a background finding out hydro geology, Vishnuprasad has labored with a number of organisations together with the Centre for Environment Education. A poet and author as effectively, he later took to the humanities, particularly intrigued by the spontaneity and thrill of efficiency artwork. He earned a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from JNU, Delhi and since then, has been exploring the varied prospects of the style. After his debut Malayalam novel Matthias printed earlier this yr, Vishnuprasad is working on his subsequent.
‘Footnotes’ will probably be an ongoing mission, says Vishnuprasad, the place he would proceed his engagement with the difficulty. “It is not just a documentation, but a response to the changing realities.”
