Sensorium
Encoded metaphors in literature, photography, music
and cinema stand reflected and mirrored in each other at Sensorium, the aptly
named festival of arts, literature and ideas at Sunaparanta. It embodies a stimulating interplay of
photographers, writers, artists, musicians and cinematographers engaged in a creative
dialogue.
Sensorium a highly researched theory by Marshall
McLuhan in the 20thcentury relates to senses as “constituting a kind of synaesthetic system, a
“five sense sensorium”(1961), in which individual senses are in intricate
interplay. McLuhan often speaks of the impressions on one sense being
translated readily into another, of “sight translated into sound and sound
translated into movement, and taste and smell. The effects of media on the
senses are manifest through the response of an interdependent group or an
interconnected system of the senses. The stimulus of one sense causes a perception by another,
seemingly unrelated sense, as in musicians who can taste the intervals
between notes, or artists who can smell colors.” When we
read, our mind’s eye creates visual images and we hear sounds of a storm, taste
the smell of wet mud…….
A brainwave of the Delhi Photo Festival founder
Prashant Pinjar and director Siddharth Dhanvant Sanghvi , Sensorium becomes a
celebration of photography in connection with literature and other arts.
Occupying centre stage is the work of Italian photo journalist Fausto Giaccone.
When he became bewitched by the literature of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he spent
a long space of time, walking and photographing the streets and locales in
Marquez’s books especially Macondo (a fictionalized town as real as RK Narayan’s
Malgudi or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha). His book
- Macondo The World of Gabriel Garcia
Marquez published by Postcart is a
visual reproduction of the entire kaleidoscopic imagery of Aracataca, and the Colombian
region where Marquez lived and wove his experiential first-hand very own synaesthetic system( the five sense sensorium) into literature. Giaccone’s endeavour to convey
the smell, sound, taste and feel of the magical reality of the milieu, as it
was then, with annotated text from Hundred Years of Solitude makes the fare on
display at Sunaparanta a treat to one’s sensorium.
“Marquez has risen to become stardust, a flashing literary comet”, but
Giaccone’s work takes us on a nostalgic rewind, into a magical world rooted in
a reality that once was and is immortalized through such endeavours. “The most
wildest and tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end…….little by little
studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory – he realized that the
day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but no one
would remember their use…… when people want to refer to nations as places slow
to develop---- held back by oppression, imperialism, they may shrug their
shoulders and sigh “Macondo’.”
The caption Photo Poetry in the next room photographically interprets
the poetry of Octavio Paz, the great Mexican poet, writer and diplomat. It is a
spectacular insight into a poet’s work who unseeingly sees the glory and
grandeur of decaying palaces through the ravages of time. Photographers
inspired by the poems make a free translation through their lenses. Poetic
expressions like The Balcony, The Mausoleum of Humayun, the Tomb of Amir Khusru
which Paz wrote in the 1960s, when he was the Mexican ambassador to India;
exploring the cohesion between poetry, silence and time is expressively
transfigured in frozen black and white shots by Adil Hasan, Subrata Biswas and
Sudeep Sen. “A palette, exposing
photographic plates-bromide undulations of an untold story- a narrative to be
matted and mounted – a frame freeing open its borders to dream.”
In line with it are select photo pictures of Dayanita Singh’s oeuvre in
photography, in sync with book titles – Difficult Loves, Shadow lines, A Room
of One’s Own......But the exhibit is
called Offset, photography counterbalancing complete literature works..
The front lawn is house to an installation by the Magnum nominee, Sohrab
Hura, excerpts from his forthcoming book, Life is Elsewhere. The teeming crowds
of Raghu Rai and color and sound of Raghuvir Singh morph into an eerie
wilderness. Unrelenting anguish sweeps across the frames(text and photos)
mounted on lecterns , lit by a light peering from under a scalloped seashell. A
disturbing true-to-life reality, which sears one to the core. You read on and
somewhere towards the end, color starts seeping into the frames, healing the
scarred emotions of the artist and the viewer.
Gopika Chowfla’s ‘Flesh’ UV prints on film in a darkroom are accompanied
by the text: “In my exploration, the term flesh becomes a non-specific entity.
Blurring the lines between the real and imagined, the images of flesh, animal human and vegetable are created to
provoke a sensory and corporeal reaction” His exhibition, an echo of Edward
Weston’s photography, exposes the texture of skin of fruits and vegetables, and
slicing of animal flesh to recreate a sexual and visceral experience. Watching
cleaved, palpable exposed flesh, completely removed from its context imbues a
pleasurable feeling of sensuality and beauty in the viewer.
The courtyard flanked by the cafe is witness to blow-ups of Jazz
musicians in concert by Farrokh
Chothia. He spent more than a decade with jazz musicians and when other
photographers would move away after taking their shots for the newspaper, he
would stay behind and then he felt as if the musicians performed for him,
redirecting and aligning their energies to him or his art and he caught them in
sublime poses. Music, Indian classical and Jazz has been a soundtrack of his
life. Salman Rushdie’s comments in bold on the wall alongside read: “blurring
the distinction between composer and performer…improvising within a formal
framework, allowing for passages of virtuosic brilliance amid moments of
sadder, deeper restraint”. He further reteirates: “Don’t look at these pictures
in silence. They
ask for music to be played.”
ask for music to be played.”
The hand-crafted photo books in the library are special and enchanting
in an old world manner. Regina Maria Anzenberger the curator ‘leads us to the discovery of the
joy of personalising visual narratives with
handmade books.’ The Archivist by Nony Singh, Go Away Closer in a series by
Dayanita Singh.....black and white photography gives way to color to
digitization – joy of photography parlays into intellectual perspective to
abstraction and sometimes an absence. Whole lives and generations are
chronicled, sorted, filtered and made legendary. Landscape confluencing
metaphorical text evolves spirally vertical to higher realms..
The idea of a confluence of the arts is a masterstroke. As Farrokh Chothia says, “That’s a great way of pulling in whole
groups of other worlds – it is just exponentially opening up to all kinds of
other things. This gives me a context too about why I would be there. This
gives a much broader sense to the whole idea of taking pictures. You are not
just looking at photography but also looking at how it interacts with other
aspects.” Some festivals are more than a party indeed!
