The studio was more than a workspace.
From giving it a room where ideas could fail, pause, shift direction, and begin again. It held uncertainty as much as making, allowing me to navigate the process through fragments of text, images, and sound that slowly found one another.

I came to the residency wanting to move beyond my film-based practice and towards seeing access as a creative approach. Thinking through captions, language, soundscape and image making as digital form, I began to see translation of all of this through my peers’ practices and mediums.

Through collaborations, we attempted to break an act of perceiving images from one point of view, how vibrations is itself a language, and the labour that a sheet of paper holds. We explored the concept of synesthesia where smell and touch evokes images, sound and memory and reflected on how meaning constantly shifts as it moves between forms.

As much as my app was a part of all studio visits and galleries where conversations was about influence of translation and language itself, I started to question –

Are words just words? Or does it actually mean something?

How do we navigate the environment through live transcription?

How careful you will be when you know you are being perceived?

My exploration grew through materials and its tactility. Writing became a form of poetry, transcription became a way of listening, and setting the space became an act of labour and pause to make sense of the gibberish (translation).

Can I sit with my feelings here? is an invitation to slowness. Rooted in my lived experience, to what it means to hold feelings within acts of translation and whether words can become something that can be encountered across different mediums of sound, text and images.

It takes a village <3
Thank you,

Gauri Pathak, Sameera Sardana Elizabeth Lalruatdiki, அணு aṇu, Arieno Kera, Mahima Varma, Sahil Kumar Puneet Jain, Priyanka D’Souza, Janhavi Khemka