Beyond frontiers, the artists are working together, sometimes without realizing it, on the thousand faces of a single work which will rise up to confront the totalitarian creation – Albert Camus
Overview
South Asia is land of great beauty, opportunities, natural & cultural diversity. Its a land of varied beliefs & practices in culture, literature, religious life and identities ; which have co ex
isted and negotiated their space through dialogues. South Asia is not a paradigm but a ‘discursive formation’, with its remarkable capacity of ‘giving birth simultaneously to mutually exclusive objects, without having to modify itself.”
The region is a also a hotbed for conflicts and more often than not arising out of vortex of political ambition of superpowers and exploitation of fissure lines which are intrinsically present in context of religion and ethnicity, leveraging the poor economic conditions. South Asia is in the current era of corporatization, has been affected by an eugenic drive to suitably create condition for the area as a potential market and also a site for cheap production of goods & services which threatens to submerge spaces, identities & communities into procrustean polarities. Fascism has been on the rise, “dialogue has been replaced by polemics” in all sphere and drive towards totalitarianism is palpable. The voice of art has been throttled, manipulated & patronized to voice the dubious ideologies, as ‘intimidation’ is the the order which threatens to transform ‘humanity into ‘silhouettes’. Yet there have been voices which have existed and them too sometimes appropriated by ideology. Art has the responsibility of providing a bulwark against the rampaging madness of rationalities & its appropriation of technologies which are destructive to the ecology and peaceful co- existence. It is art which can make sense and harmonize the diverse condition of the South Asian region, for are artists ‘forced to be refractory’. throwing up a myriad possibilities of co -existence & technologies for a sustainable future. The South Asian entity is also but a “social relation among people mediated by images”. In forging this social relation is a journey of wading through reality towards a future aesthetics, which can only emerge from the tools and resources available and how it flows through or around various obstacles which are both ‘real & ‘unreal’. The process of negotiating and renegotiating is hence the very essence of emergence of new possibilities. It is with the idea of connecting the artists of the South Asia region, in spite of the differences and lack of resources in order to find ways to be sustainable in their practices. In this we would like The South Asian Fringe to provide new artists to showcase their work, which the frames of ‘mainstream’, would find meaningless to consider, to bring them in focus ; in touch with global practices, provide them with access to information & tools and resources, whereby they can express freely. We will also create the platform for visibility and networking which will help the artists in their future endeavors. We plan to take the festival to The South Asian diaspora all over the world. The South Asian Fringe explores the following :
South Asian spaces
We would like to explore and bring to focus spaces within South Asia through arts. In this we will climb the mountains, meander through bylanes and soak in the coasts. Spaces which seek transcendence and galvanizes our attention to their vulnerability in the face of the changing ecology. We hope that our festivals will discover new venues and sites and lead to allow an insight and transform the spaces into sites of exploration of possibilities and creativity, while at the same time reiterate their unique situation in our world and hence our responsibilities towards them as fellow humans. South Asian identity & communities
In the contemporary, in the era of globalization, rooted as we are in traditions with its many hues, when fundamentalism seeks to herd us into a paradigm of isolation ; we struggle to shed this past and paradigm and seek not a void, an anarchy – but to state consciously our myriad identities. The Fringe brings us closer to the world and we co create, dance, sing, recite, tell our stories and feel renewed. It is bring into focus communities who are being threatened to oblivion, for art and artists to be in solidarity with them to give them a new voice in this crazy world. Sudipta Dawn
Parnab Mukherjee on The South Asian Fringe
In 1958, Harold Pinter wrote: ‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. What is false?”
With myriad use of body, pitch, off-bass voice, installation, puppetry and body-as-a-live sculpture, theatre, butoh, video installation montages, the idea of this fringe is specifically designed for an interactive ambiance with the audience. The audience here is a reference point to bounce the script. What emerges is a powerful pastiche of events lined up to push the envelope of both the manual and digital. Why another fringe? It is about exploitation of a system. But more than that the rampant globalisation of a set of outmoded stereotypes. Into that realm of thinking lies the true conscience of our social questioning.The fringe will seek to collect, curators and issue-based activists. and create a tapestry of immersive experiences.To build bridges with the community and urge them to create relevant art interventions. Kicking off with Dharamshala, South Asian Fringe will be an unique show that looks at the both the physical and the metaphorical body. To quote Jean Baudrillard:;The mass media are anti-mediatory and intransitive. They fabricate non-communication — this is what characterizes them, if one agrees to define communication as an exchange, as a reciprocal space of a speech and a response. … Now, the totality of the existing architecture of the media founds itself on this latter definition: they are what always prevent response, making all processes of exchange impossible…”
Be there to see the exchange process of making, unmaking and becoming. COMPRISING OF a QUARTET
a: Mountain Fringe (South Asian Mountain Fringe)
b: Coast Fringe (South Asian Coast Fringe)
c: Bylane Fringe (South Asian Bylane Fringe)
d: Community Fringe (South Asian Community Fringe
The Mountain India Edition
Resilience : to stand in the path of lightning
Resilience : to walk when darkness falls at noon
Resilience : to grind yourself fine in the turning mill
Resilience will come to you
Lal Ded
We dedicate the Mountain India Edition of The South Asian Fringe Lal Ded, who is a lived and in Kashmir in the 14th century, was a mystic. Drawing inspiration from her life and resilience in belief in the face of unbelievable odds and hence paving the way for future thinkers, mystics and poets to seek salvation from the oppressive conditions, we seek to give voice to this edition. The uttering of Lal Ded stands resolute much like the mountains through centuries. Her ways were that of compete devotion to the seeker of knowledge and aesthetics and may say she was a member of the Ta***ic underground. We climb to the mountains of Dharmasala to seek this spirit of resilience to rediscover our inner self and fill the spaces with new forms of artistic expressions, which embody the spirit of resilience against the vicissitudes of art & the artist, and here we celebrate at The Mountain India Edition, this resilience of the artist. The Mountain India Edition will be held at multiple venues – indoors & outdoor at the Jogibara Village, Mcleodganj, Dharmasla, Himachal Pradesh India. The dates are May 5-7, 2017. Artists from South Asia, Europe and South America will be participating at this festival. The events lined by would include – theatre, dance, performances, performance art, poetry, video art, sound art & music. The Mountain India Edition of The South Asian Fringe has been bought to you by Culture Monks in collaboration with Subbody Butoh School, Mud House, Francesca Fini Performance Art India, Robert Cahen, W- OW (We are one world) Project, Nezaket Ekici, Marcus Shahar, Maham Suhail & several other artists from throughout the world.
