The view

Where do you look from? Is it from the boat, is it from the train, is it from above or below, from the outside or at the front line? The positioning of oneself to what is going on around is never an easy task but if you decide to participate in solving a problem or at least pointing to the existence of  such a problem,  it should be done as a process and you must know that it will take time.

The collaborating artists and partners Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran spoke to us yesterday and introduced us during the lunch talk titled "The boat medium" to their methods of working, view points and topics that inspired them. They opened for us a world, as Thomas Kilpper pointed out, of complexity that is something new and different to what he has learned to know and therefore he found it to be difficult to respond to.

The world of trade is the space where their project lives. It is a collaboration of different members of the group" Camp" and at their roots is the idea of the exploration of the technology, its history and its possible future. Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran are as they said at one point during the talk, front men of the group but they never forget who is helping them to work on a project and help it develop. A great sense of collaborative work was felt and of different mediums coming together from many different sides in producing the final piece. They presented to us a short insert from their film "From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf" and also spoke to us about the publication of the book that came prior to the film that documented all the ships and the loads they were carrying on them in the space of 4 years, starting from the year marked as the beginning of the financial crises. The ships are mediums of trade but also they should be viewed as machines with their own end and a space of their own accord.

But even with this in mind there is a great sense of community, of coming together. The film is similar to a collage piece of work. It is created with the use of archive footage, video recordings from the sailors collected via Bluetooth upon meeting with them in some of the ports, of Indian music and their lyrics, of recordings made by the artists of the ships leaving.  It is the medium that they work with, as they explained it to be "collective film journal".

The lunch talk hit something very personal for me. This idea of seeing the world that you can't quite grasp made me think about where I stand in the world that is mine. It made me also think about my own position at the Summer Academy and where is my view. With this I mean what is my position here and where do I stand? This position is a very interesting and a new one for me since I am somewhere in the middle and I am challenged. This feeling of being challenged is not something that I am the only one experiencing here. During my talks with students I have learned that a lot of them are challenged by their professors to step out of their comfort zones and to do something that is completely new to them.

So we are all here in a sense as collage pieces ourselves. We have the old, the new and something borrowed as well. But let us also not forget the other view, "the view from the other boat" that flips again the experiences we have and creates this inverted world while our world still can exists.