Notes on Two Laments

by Monika Weiss

2015

In October 2014 Amit Mukhopadhyay, curator in the public sphere based in Kolkata, India, invited me to create a new project in relationship to the city of Delhi. I conducted intense and intuitive research into the history of Delhi, while continuing my focus on Lament as a vehicle of meaning in relation to postmemory.

I became focused on two events and two sites of trauma: the recent brutal bus rape and killing of Jyoti Singh on December 16, 2012, and the colonial residue of India Gate memorial, whose foundation was laid on February 10, 1921 by the Imperial War Graves Commission. The resulting work, Two Laments, is a series of 19 short film projections with sound compositions (19 Cantos) and a related series of drawings, film stills, and photography, which I began in 2015 and continue at present. This work in-progress considers public memory and amnesia in the construction of the space of a city. Two Laments is a response to the two forms of violation of two kinds of embodied sites: the body of the woman and the body of the city.  19 Cantos may be presented as a continuous film projection, or as an installation consisting of multiple projections in one large space, and also as a series of concurrent projections in multiple rooms.

On December 16, 2012 in Munirka/Delhi, 23-year-old Jyoti Singh (sometimes referred to as Nirbhaya) was brutally gang-raped on a moving bus and later died. In court transcripts of the trial, I found a statement by one of the perpetrators who remembered seeing a red ribbon coming from her body. The red ribbon, which upon further investigation revealed itself to be her intestines, signified her body being taken inside out, a horrific and transgressive exaggeration of the act of the rape itself. This fact became a catalyst for the entire project of Two Laments. In Two Laments (19 Cantos) the red ribbon becomes a veil, poetically enshrouding Delhi, which becomes a meta-city, standing for all cities bearing traces of historical and gendered trauma. Dedicated to Nirbhaya (Fearless)—sometimes referred to as “India’s Daughter”— 19 Cantos were inspired also by Treny (19 Laments) by the 16-century Polish poet Jan Kochanowski, written on his daughter's death. The gang rape of Nirbhaya stands for rapes committed around the world as acts of war and aggression, reaching far beyond any notion of desire or sexuality. A woman’s rape is often culturally associated with victimhood and actively erased from cultural memory. The city - understood as public space - protects its public memory, which should not be “polluted” with the memory of crimes against bodies of women. There are no memorials engraved with the names of rape victims, and, by extension, there are no memorials to women who have perished as victims of war. The 2012 gang rape was a grotesque and extreme form of prolonged torture that took almost two hours as the bus was moving through the city of Delhi, thus implicating the entire city, and by extension, any city around the world. 

19 Cantos is a series of short film projections. Most of the silent projections are accompanied by sound compositions, in which I layer recordings of the cityscape of Old Delhi, as well as studio recordings of Carnatic singers, and my piano improvisations. Some Cantos will remain silent. The projections show slow, gradual, repetitive movements performed by women volunteers, and by myself. I choreographed and filmed the movement performers in Delhi and in New York. Each woman occupies one film projection, however she is almost always seen as two figures. In most of  19 Cantos the presence of Nirbhaya is evoked as double, as two women, or rather, as one woman seen twice. Filmed in different times, thanks to film editing technologies/montage, the gap of time between the different incarnations of the protagonist and the possibility of seeing both versions of her presence simultaneously, creates a space marked by circular and suspended time. 

The slowness of time and movement, as well as the specific tempo employed in this work, are meant to prolong the symbolized and veiled, enshrouded (and not exposed), moments of trauma. For the audience to be with, to witness but also to honor. Through this doubling of the Nirbhaya’s figure I want to create a third space, a zone between her two incarnations, towards an intimate and affective bond, a sisterhood and a shared space towards a future without rape. In  19 Cantos, the woman is almost never alone; she is co-present with the other self, her twin sister, who may also represent our own presence and participation.

In  Canto 3 (2015) a young woman dressed in long black robe appears as if lying down on a drawing or map of Old Delhi. Thanks to film montage the map and the protagonist figure seem equal in size. This drawn map was published in The Illustrated London News on Jan 16, 1857, showing the city a few days before the siege by the British Empire. The siege was a response to the city uprising against the oppressive colonization. In Canto 3 the figure moves gradually, very slowly. At some point her body becomes two women, mirroring each other. Her long black robe gradually becomes soiled by the dirt of the ground, as if stained by the map of the city itself. She also seems to enshroud the city with her body, with her presence, and with her veil. Ultimately, by the end of the projection, it is she and her double, two women, who gradually disappear, leaving their headscarves laid over the surface of the city. Nirbhaya, her double, and the city of Old Delhi, merge together. 

India Gate memorial was built by the British Empire centrally within New Delhi to commemorate Indian soldiers who died for the Empire during the First World War. India Gate, modeled after Arc de Triomphe in Paris (albeit larger and taller than its French model), mirrors the grand design of the entirety of New Delhi; the same architect, Edwin Lutyens, designed both. It seems New Delhi is intended as a form of architectural and cultural response to Old Delhi, perhaps to “teach” India what culture should look like. The intended meaning of the memorial is further complicated by the typical omission of the actual war representation in the architecture and design of the monument, bearing engraved names of some 80,000 soldiers. 

The war itself is usually absent from war memorials in order to enable our selective forgetting of its full dimension, which is the destruction of life on a massive scale. India Gate thus represents a typical heroic style, institutionalized and cleansed from the embodied death/war pollution. In Two Laments this monumental, heroic, and cleansed form of public memory is replaced with the intimate, embodied Lament, inviting us to consider the prolonged and not erased memory of rape and torture, which in traditional public memory culture is normally quickly pushed away, outside of heroic memory.

In one of the 19 films in Two Laments we see a text only, as if engraved in stone, appearing against dark backgroud. I dreamed this text while working on this project in New Delhi. Upon waking up, I wrote it down. The text became part of the spoken and the written language appearing in several of the 19 films. Working on that part of the project and aiming towards a monumental expression, inspired me to consider another, future piece, a monument/antimonument, which I imagine as a stone sarcophagus. Two Laments (19 Cantos) are dedicated to the forgotten and often erased from public space memory of gender-based violence. Set against war-related amnesia illustrated by institutionally cherished memory of fallen soldiers, Two Laments addresses global narratives of violence against women and cities.

 
Evoking ancient rituals of lamentation, I envision a companion project to the 19 films, a large-scale performance enacted around India Gate and filmed from an airplane. Hundreds of women volunteers will gather to perform silent gestures of lamentation. The women will cover the ground around India Gate with large sheets of white canvas, which will be stitched together. They will lie down drawing abstract lines around their bodies holding chunks of charcoal, creating a drawing landscape. Filmed from the airplane, the resulting image will show the performance from a great distance, with the identities of the participants protected yet also honored.

CREDITS 
Written, directed, composed, choreographed, filmed, recorded, and edited by the artist. 

Texts:  
Meena Alexander’s poem  Moksha is incorporated into  Canto 4 with the permission of the author and of the publisher: Atmospheric Embroidery (Hachette India: New Delhi, 2015). 

This Is My Ribbon is a poetic text that I wrote in English in March 2015 while in New Delhi. It was translated into Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, and Oriya by Mr. Dasgupta, Md. Saffique, and Basanta Sahoo. Additional translations into other languages are in progress. The text appears in written and oral form throughout  19 Cantos. 

Volunteer Performers & Vocalists include:  
Priyanka Bhardwaj, Anarya Dodes, Vinita Dasgupta, Divya Khandekar, Neha Naraya and Ruth Blair Moyers. More performers volunteers will be listed upon the completion of the project. 

Acknowledgments: 
Special thanks to Amit Mukhopahyay, curator in the public sphere, Kolkata; the Polish Cultural Institute, New Delhi; Sanskriti Museums & Foundation, New Delhi, Goethe Institut New Delhi; Hyphen-Hub, New York; and numerous individuals who contributed efforts to this project, including studio assistants and interns, Gretchen Oldelm, Jun Bae, and Yulin Peng.