Projections ( A Video Series)

The shack, as a type of residence, has always remained an epitome of depravity and a symbol of downtrodden hopes for shelter that many experience throughout life.

Its thin, corrugated steel walls are no means of isolation; they provide no astute privacy to the occupants and are crude in keeping one’s business concealed.

Sounds from the outside seep through, and as such, a myriad of lives can be related in the silence of the shack, secrets caged by eavesdropping tend to build each community of shack dweller.

With images of protesting residents of another squatter-camp projected on this shack of isolation during this global lockdown, this video poem is a meditative reflection on how isolation can make seeming exterior concerns of life cage and oppress those captured indoors during these times of forced introspection.

Projecting these incensed demonstrations by a populace in revolt, on walls of a single shack, becomes an installed representation with an express resolve to bear testimony to their righteous indignation with the status quo.

These projections become modes of externalizing internal conflicts, beyond acts of merely documenting conflict but remodeling abstractions that delve into elemental inner and outer worlds of man.

Volunteering confinement resembles a method of complicity with the tyrannical prospects of surveillance, but does one interrogate their confinement in such unprecedented times?

And while contradictions between isolation and incarceration might exist – this period conjures up all abhorrent issues of our decaying society, which in turn forces artists into an irreverent view of life’s continued pulsation.

Through this subtle layering of disparate images to create new visual representation of the soul’s conflict with itself, when faced with prospect of immortality through either violence of the state or the virus, a debilitating attempt at reconciliation with fate is achieved.

Any township with its ‘not-so-temporary’ structural decorum of shacks radiates a claustrophobic air of poverty, contorted dreams and unsavory dilemmas of morality for our survivalist needs. The innocuous inner turmoil experienced often by those who reside here, is eventually externalized in other forms of violence and abandonment.

For artists immersed in this existence, there tends to develop a personalized architecture of inner conflict, which then informs the art used to reconfigure all their creative output and responses to crisis.

These video poems are visual reclamation technique of exposing my isolation, as interpreted through creative methods my skill allows.

And as with all transient experiences, this chapter of projected rage, longing, solitudes and awe, remains a testament of a productive idleness in praise of confinement and introspective isolation.