Santasil Mallik

Farrago is an unkempt diary that generates a stream of audio-visual dissonance without an attempt to resolve it. While some parts of the varied montage traverse along with contemporary political issues, other parts blend fictional and documentary narratives to spawn a meaningless tale of a city and its fathomless vigor. This film failingly tries to construct a narrative out of small, disjointed and unassociated clips; yet, this failure itself is imbued with sporadic instances of political statements.

Anomalies transliterate a twin-channel simulation imagining the visual-semantic proximities to the medical conditions of fibrosis and thrombosis. The videos are disassociated from their provincial significations to reflect the barest textural surface of the conditions. Hindered blood channels, palpitation, restlessness, and breathing irregularities are mapped in their formalist rhythm with metaphoric linkages. The synthetic blend of visuals and noises attempts to retrace human corporeality in global systems of communication and primordial conditions of life. With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and worldwide lockdown, it has become evident how transnational networks reconfigure in response to the often disavowed precarity of the human body. This work attempts to remember our organismic vulnerability amidst contemporary transactions.

In the winter of 1882, the physiologist and scientist Étienne-Jules Marey spent hours on the beach of Posillipo in Naples, pointing an odd-shaped gun at flying birds. The locals started calling him "the fool of Posillipo," as no one ever heard a gunshot. Nor did any birds die. Or, perhaps, Marey was involved in an imperceptible process of killing, shooting birds twelve times a second with his latest invention, the chronophotographic gun - a precursor to moving image technology. The audio-visual assemblage locates the "gun camera" as a speculative prototype of imperialist technology, shadowing related practices from the colonial sport of bird hunting to cartography, anthropometry, ethnographic field recordings, and modern warfare.

Anomalies transliterate a twin-channel simulation imagining the visual-semantic proximities to the medical conditions of fibrosis and thrombosis. The videos are disassociated from their provincial significations to reflect the barest textural surface of the conditions. Hindered blood channels, palpitation, restlessness, and breathing irregularities are mapped in their formalist rhythm with metaphoric linkages. The synthetic blend of visuals and noises attempts to retrace human corporeality in global systems of communication and primordial conditions of life. With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and worldwide lockdown, it has become evident how transnational networks reconfigure in response to the often disavowed precarity of the human body. This work attempts to remember our organismic vulnerability amidst contemporary transactions.