Retrace

Simran Gupte

Narrative

She came from a city that guided each one straight to where they wanted to be. With signages and street lights, carriages and flights, it was designed to recede her memory. She wondered often, although only for a moment, was hers the only way. She wondered until the day she found herself walking, unbound, truly moving, far away.

Her memory almost diminished, she finally reached a new place. The hills, barren of the signs she read, barren of the lights that bred her, except one, the radar. It invited her and in she went. She wondered once, and for more than a moment, how am I to sway. She wondered until the day she found herself panting, bound, adjusting, still far away.

Food for thought

Have you ever wondered about what would happen if one fine morning you were transposed off to a new space; one that reeks nothing of your home? Wouldn’t every missing door disguise itself as a door to your home, every coat hanger rest in the exact same spot, your pet’s paws stomping through the passageway, your chair waiting for you to rest and the missing study cueing you to read?

Abstract

Our everyday life is disposed of a million domestic visual cues that we have habituated ourselves to. From the first riser of the staircase to the placement of a light switch, our domestic space is “a group of organic habits.” (Bachelard, 1984)

Framework

Intrigued by Graham Harman’s definition of “emergent entity” in Object Oriented Ontology, the host of my site took shape of a situation caused by discontinuous domestic human memory. I organised my research by first defining three core elements: the weather radar, a female human and the host, a situation. Creating narrative-based models helped me analyse the personality of the female character, and site-specificity of the weather radar with regards to the dynamic situation.

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_AOOp_7TNk

Further, mapping keywords highlighted explicit areas of interest that I dissected in the form of case studies. Films, plays, books and research essays helped question the embodiment of home, role of objects in making a space feel like home and possibility of sensory attachment felt towards them. Gaston Bachelard’s book, The Poetics of Space shed light on the emotional response caused by placement of spaces, while Pina Bausch’s Café Muller explained spatial choreographies in relation to a single domestic object.

Reflecting critically on these findings helped me choreograph my domestic movements as a female human in a new space in the form of a video.