Raqs Media Collective - Now and Elsewhere

7/29/2019 Raqs Media Collective - Now and Elsewhere

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Raqs Media Collective

Now andElsewhere

The Problem and the ProvocationWe would like to begin by taking a sentence fromthe formulation of the problem that set the ballrolling for this lecture series. In speaking of theÒhesitation in developing any kind ofcomprehensive strategyÓ for understandingprecisely what it is that we call contemporary arttoday (in the wake of the last twenty years ofcontemporary art activity), the introduction to

the series speaks of its having Òassumed a fullymature form Ð and yet it still somehow refuses tobe historicized as such.Ó1

ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊSimultaneously an assertion and areticence to name oneÕs place in time, it is thisequivocation that we would really like to discuss.

The Old Man and the Wind: Joris IvensÕ FilmAt the very beginning of Joris Ivens andMarceline LoridanÕs film Une histoire de vent (ATale of the Wind), we see a frail Joris Ivens sitting

in a chair on a sand dune in the Gobi Desert, onthe border between China and Mongolia, waitingfor the arrival of a sandstorm.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊElsewhere in the film, an old woman Ð awind shaman Ð talks about waiting for the wind.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊBuffeted as we are by winds that blow fromso many directions with such intensity, thisimage of an old man in a chair waiting for a stormis a metaphor for a possible response to thequestion ÒWhat is contemporaneity?ÓÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIt takes stubbornness, obstinacy, to face astorm, and yet also a desire not to be blown awayby it. If Paul KleeÕs Angelus Novus, celebrated inBenjaminÕs evocation of the angel of history, withits head caught in turning between the storm ofthe future and the debris of the present, wereever in need of a more recent annotation, thenold man Ivens in his chair, waiting for the wind,would do very nicely.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIt is tempting to think of this dual obstinacyÐ to face the storm and not be blown away Ð asan acute reticence that is at the same time arefusal to either run away from or be carriedaway by the strong winds of history, of timeitself.Ê

ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWe could see this Òreticence,Ó this Òrefusalto historicize,Ó as a form of escape from thetyranny of the clock and the calendar Ðinstruments to measure time, and to measureour ability to keep time, to keep to the demandsof the time allotted to us by history, ourcontemporaneity. Any reflection oncontemporaneity cannot avoid simultaneouslybeing a consideration of time, and of our relationto it.

On Time

Time girds the earth tight. Day after day, astrideminutes and seconds, the hours ride as they

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Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920,watercolor.

must, relentlessly. In the struggle to keep pacewith clocks, we are now always and everywherein a state of jet lag, always catching up withourselves and with others, slightly short ofbreath, slightly short of time.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe soft insidious panic of time ticking awayin our heads is syncopated by acceleratedheartbeat of our everyday lives. Circadianrhythms (times to rise and times to sleep, times

for work and times for leisure, times for sunlightand times for stars) get muddled as millions offaces find themselves lit by timelessfluorescence that trades night for day. Sleep isbesieged by wakefulness, hunger is fed bystimulation, and moments of dreaming and lucidalertness are eroded with the knowledge ofintimate terrors and distant wars.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWhen possible, escape is up a hatch anddown a corridor between and occasionallybeyond longitudes, to places where the hourschime epiphanies. Escape is a resonant word in

the vocabulary of clockmaking. It gives usanother word Ð escapement.

Escapement2

Escapement is a horological or clockmakingterm. It denotes the mechanism in mechanicalwatches and clocks that governs the regular

motion of the hands through a Òcatch andreleaseÓ device that both releases and restrainsthe levers that move the hands for hours,minutes, and seconds. Like the catch and releaseof the valves of the heart that allow blood to flowbetween its chambers, setting the basic rhythmof life, the escapement of a watch regulates oursense of the flow of time. The continuedpulsation of our hearts and the ticking of clocks

denote our freedom from an eternal present.Each heartbeat, each passing second marks thehere and now, promises the future, and recallsthe resonance of the last heartbeat. Our hearttells us that we live in time.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe history of clockmaking saw a definiteturn when devices for understanding timeshifted away from the fluid principles of ancientChinese water and incense clocks Ð for whichtime was a continuum, thus making it moredifficult to surgically separate past and present,then and now Ð to clocks whose ticking seconds

rendered a conceptual barricade between eachunit, its predecessor and its follower. This iswhat makes now seem so alien to then.Paradoxically, it opens out another zone ofdiscomfort. Different places share the same timebecause of the accident of longitude. Thusclocks in London and Lagos (with adjustments

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Raqs Media Collective, Escapement, 2009. 27 clocks, high glass aluminium with LED lights, four flat screen monitors, video and audio looped. Dimensionsvariable. Left: Installation view. Right: Detail.

made for daylight savings) show the same time.And yet, the experience of ÒnowÓ in London andLagos may not feel the same at all.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊAn escape from Ð or, one might say, a full-onwillingness to confront Ð this vexation might befound by taking a stance in which one iscomfortable with the fact that we exist at theintersection of different latitudes andlongitudes, and that being located on this grid,

we are in some sense phatically in touch withother times, other places. In a syncopated sort ofway, we are ÒcontemporaneousÓ with other timesand spaces.

My Name is Chin Chin ChooIn Howrah Bridge, a Hindi film-noir thriller from1958 set in a cosmopolitan Calcutta (which, in itsshadowy grandeur resembled the Shanghai ofthe jazz age), a young dancer, the half-Burmese,half-Baghdadi-Jewish star and vamp of vintageHindi film, Helen, plays a Chinese bar dancer.

And in the song ÒMy Name is Chin Chin Choo,Ó abig band jazz, kitsch orientalist, and sailor-costumed musical extravaganza, she expressesa contemporaneity that is as hard to pin down asit is to avoid being seduced by.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe lyrics weave in the Arabian Nights,Aladdin, and Sinbad; the singer invokes thebustle of Singapore and the arch trendiness ofShanghai; the music blasts a Chicago big bandsound; the sailor-suited male backup dancerssuddenly break into Cossack knee-bends. Timesand spaces, cities and entire cultural histories Ðreal or imagined Ð collide and whirl in heady

counterpoint. YesterdayÕs dance ofcontemporaneity has us all caught up in itsShanghaiÐCalcuttaÐDelhiÐBombayÐSingaporeturbulence. We are all called Chin Chin Choo.Hello, mister, how do you do?

ContemporaneityContemporaneity, the sensation of being in atime together, is an ancient enigma of a feeling. It

is the tug we feel when our time pulls at us. Butsometimes one has the sense of a paradoxicallyasynchronous contemporaneity Ð the strange tugof more than one time and place Ð as if anaccumulation or thickening of our attachmentsto different times and spaces were manifestingitself in the form of some unique geologicaloddity, a richly striated cross section of a rock,sometimes sharp, sometimes blurred, marked bythe passage of many epochs.

Now and Elsewhere

The problem of determining the question ofcontemporaneity hinges on how we orientourselves in relation to a cluster of occasionallycascading, sometimes overlapping, partlyconcentric, and often conflictual temporalparameters Ð on how urgent, how leisurely, oreven how lethargic we are prepared to be inresponse to a spectrum of possible answers.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊConsider the experience of beingcontinually surprised by the surface and textureof the night sky when looking through telescopesof widely differing magnifications. Thinkingabout Òwhich contemporaneityÓ to probe is not

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Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan, Une histoire de vent (A Tale of the Wind), 1988.

very different from making decisions about howdeep into the universe we would like to cast theline of our query.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊA telescope powerful enough to aid us indiscerning the shapes and extent of craters onthe moon will reveal a very different image of theuniverse than one that unravels the rings ofSaturn, or one that can bring us the light of adistant star. The universe looks different,

depending on the questions we ask of the stars.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊContemporaneity, too, looks differentdepending on the queries we put to time. If, asZhou Enlai famously remarked, it is still too earlyto tell what impact the French Revolution hashad on human history, then our sense ofcontemporaneity distends to embrace everythingfrom 1789 onwards. If, on the other hand, we aremore interested in sensing how things havechanged since the Internet came into our lives,then even 1990 can seem a long way away. Socan it seem as if it were only recently that the

printing press and movable type mademechanical reproduction of words and imagespossible on a mass scale. One could argue thattime changed once and for all when the universalregime of Greenwich Mean Time imposed a senseof an arbitrarily encoded universal time for thefirst time in human history, enabling everyone to

calculate for themselves Òwhen,Ó as in how manyhours ahead or behind they were in relation toeveryone at every other longitude. This birthed anew time, a new sense of being together in oneaccounting of time. One could also argue that,after Hiroshima made it possible to imagine thathumanity as we know it could auto-destruct,every successive year began to feel as long as ahundred years, or as an epoch, since it could

perhaps be our last. This means that, contrary toour commonplace understanding of our ÒtimeÓ asbeing Òsped up,Ó we could actually think of ourtime as being caught in the long Òwinding down,Óthe Òlong decline.Ó It all depends, really, on whatquestion we are asking.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊAnd so Marcel Duchamp can still seemsurprisingly contemporary, and Net art oddlydated. The moon landing, whose fortiethanniversary we have recently seen, brought afuture of space travel hurtlingly close to therealities of 1969. Today, the excitement

surrounding men on the moon has alreadyacquired the patina of nostalgia, and the future itheld out as a promise seems oddly dated. Thenagain, this could change suddenly if China andIndia were to embark in earnest on a second-wave Cold War space race to the moon. Ourrealities advance into and recede from

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Actress Helen singing My Name is Chin Chin Choo in Howrah Bridge, 1958, Directed by Shakti Samanta.

contemporaneity like the tides, throwing strangeflotsam and jetsam onto the shore to be found bybeachcombers with a fetish for signs fromdifferent times. The question then becomes notone of ÒperiodizingÓ contemporaneity, or oferecting a neat white picket fence around it;rather, it becomes one of finding shortcuts,trapdoors, antechambers, and secret passagesbetween now and elsewhere, or perhaps

elsewhen. Time folds, and it doesnÕt fold neatly Ðour sense of ÒwhenÓ we are is a function of whichfold we are sliding into, or climbing out of.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊA keen awareness of contemporaneitycannot but dissolve the illusion that some things,people, places, and practices are more ÒnowÓthan others. Seen this way, contemporaneityprovokes a sense of the simultaneity of differentmodes of living and doing things without a priorcommitment to any one as being necessarilymore true to our times. Any attempt to designstructures, whether permanent or provisional,

that might express or contain contemporaneitywould be incomplete if it were not (also) attentiveto realities that are either not explicit or manifestor that linger as specters. An openness andgenerosity toward realities that may be, or seemto be, in hibernation, dormant, or still information, can only help such structures to be

more pertinent and reflective. A contemporaneitythat is not curious about how it might besurprised is not worth our time.

Tagore in ChinaIn a strange and serendipitous echo from thepast, we find Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengalipoet and artist who in some sense epitomizedthe writing of different Asian modernities in the

twentieth century, saying something quitesimilar exactly eighty-five years ago in Shanghai,at the beginning of what was to prove to be ahighly contested and controversial tour of China.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe poet [and here, all we need to do is tosubstitute ÒartistÓ for ÒpoetÓ]Õs mission is toattract the voice which is yet inaudible in the air;to inspire faith in a dream which is unfulfilled; tobring the earliest tidings of the unborn flower toa skeptic world.3

ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊTagoreÕs plea operates in three distincttemporal registers: the Òas yet inaudibleÓ in the

future, the Òunfulfilled dreamÓ in the past, andthe fragility of the unborn flower in the skepticworld of the present. In each of these, the artistÕswork, for Tagore, is to safeguard and to takecustody of Ð and responsibility for Ð that whichis out of joint with its time, indeed with all time.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ

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Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong, seen from the air in the 1970s.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWe could extend this reading to say that it isto rescue from the dead weight of tradition thethings that were excluded from the canon, tomake room for that to which the future may turna deaf ear, and to protect the fragility ofcontemporary practice from present skepticism.TagoreÕs argument for a polyvocal response to thequestion of how to be ÒcontemporaryÓ wasmisinterpreted, in some senses willfully, by two

factions of Chinese intellectuals. One factioncelebrated him as an uncritical champion oftradition (which he was not), while the othercampaigned against him as a conservative andÒotherworldlyÓ critic of modernity (which herefused to be). Between them, these partisans oftradition and modernity in 1920s China missedan opportunity to engage with a sense of theinhabitation of time that refused to constructarbitrary Ð and, indeed, uncritical Ð hierarchiesin either direction: between past and present,east and west, then and now.

On ForgettingAs time passes and we grow more into thecontemporary, the reasons for rememberingother times grow, while the ability to recall themweakens. Memory straddles this paradox. Wecould say that the ethics of memory have

something to do with the urgent negotiationbetween having to remember (which sometimesincludes the obligation to mourn), and therequirement to move on (which sometimesincludes the need to forget). Both are necessary,and each is notionally contingent on theabdication of the other, but life is not led by theeasy rhythm of regularly alternating episodes ofmemory and forgetting, canceling each other out

in a neat equation that resolves itself and attainsequilibrium.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊForgetting: the true vanity ofcontemporaneity. Amnesia: a state offorgetfulness unaware of both itself and its owndeficiency. True amnesia includes forgetting thatone has forgotten all that has been forgotten. Itis possible to assume that one rememberseverything and still be an amnesiac. This isbecause aspects of the forgotten may no longeroccupy even the verge of memory. They may leaveno lingering aftertaste or hovering anticipation of

something naggingly amiss. The amnesiac is insolitary confinement, guarded by his own clones,yet secluded especially from himself.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊTypically, forms of belonging and solidaritythat rely on the categorical exclusion of anotional other to cement their constitutive bondsare instances of amnesia. They are premised on

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the forgetting of the many contrarian striationsrunning against the grain of the moment and itsprivileged solidarity. On particularly bad days,which may or may not have to do with lunarcycles, as one looks into a mirror and is unable torecognize oneÕs own image, the hatred of theother rises like a tidal bore. Those unfaithfulpatches of self are then rendered as so muchnegative space, like holes in a mirror. Instead of

being full to the brim with traces of theother,Êeach of them is seen as a void, a wound inthe self.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThis void where the self-authenticated selflies shadowed and unable to recognize itself isattributed to the contagious corrosiveness of theother. The forgetting of the emptying-out of theself by its own rage forms the ground from whichamnesia assaults the world.ÊIn trying to assertwho we are, we forget, most of all, who we are.And then we forget the forgetting.Ê

Kowloon Walled City and its Memory

Nowhere, unless perhaps in dreams, canthe phenomenon of the boundary beexperienced in a more originary way than incities.

Ð Walter Benjamin4

ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊA few months ago we spent some time inHong Kong, learning what it means to live in acity that distills its contemporaneity into arefined amnesia. We were interested inparticular by what happened to the walled city ofKowloon and its memory.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊKowloon Walled City and its disappearancefrom the urban fabric of Hong Kong can be readas a parable of contemporary amnesia. TheWalled City was once a diplomatic anomalybetween China and the British Empire thatfunctioned as a long-standing autonomous zone,a site of temporary near-permanence, an exclavewithin an enclave.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊKowloon Walled City is not just a border in

space; it also marks a border in time Ð atemporary suspension of linear time by which thevisitor agrees to the terms of a compact laid outby the current shape of the territory, a walledcompound where a delicate game betweenmemory and amnesia can be played out,apparently till eternity. This is the frontier wherereality begins to cross over into an image.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊVisiting the ÒMemorial ParkÓ that stands onthe former site of the Kowloon Walled City todayis an uncanny experience. As with all Òthemeparks,Ó walking in this enclosure is like walking in

a picture postcard spread over hectares ratherthan inches. The constructed, spacious serenity

of the park, its careful gestures to the tumult ofthe walled city by means of models, oral-historycapsules, artifacts, replicas, and remains intendto provoke in the visitor some of the frisson in thefact that he or she is standing at what was onceboth condemned as an urban dystopia of crime,vice, and insanitation, and hailed as an anarchistutopia. The neighborhood itself may havedisappeared, but its footprint in popular culture

can be discerned in the simulacral sites of actionsequences in cyberpunk science fiction,gangster and horror films, manga, and multi-usercomputer games.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe walled city had approximately thirtythousand people living in one-hundredth of asquare mile, which amounts roughly to anaverage population-per-unit-area density ratio of3.3 million people to a square mile. This makes itthe densest inhabited unit of space in worldhistory.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIf we think of this space as a repository of

memories, it would be the most haunted place onearth.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWhy do such spaces Ð sometimes crowded,sometimes empty (but apparently crowded withghosts) Ð appear in a manner that is almost viral,such that the trope of empty, but hauntedstreets, set in the near future of global cities,begins to show the first signs of a cinematicepidemic of our times? Will we remember thecinema of the early twenty-first century as thefirst intimation of the global collapse of urbanspace under its own weight?ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊOr is this imaginary appearance of ahaunting, suicidal metropolis more of aninoculation than a symptom, an early shoring-upof the defenses of citizens against their ownobsolescence? How can we remember, or evenrepresent, an inoculation that could be anobituary just as much as it could be apremonition or a warning?ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe surrealist poet Louis Aragon, speakingof the disappearing neighborhoods of Paris asthe city morphed into twentieth-centurymodernity, once wrote thatÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊit is only today, when the pickaxe menaces

them, that they have at last become the truesanctuaries of the cult of the ephemeral . . .Places that were incomprehensible yesterday,and that tomorrow will never know.5

ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWhat happens when someone from withinthese spaces that were Òincomprehensibleyesterday and that tomorrow will never knowÓdecides to make themselves known? How doestheir account of the space square with its morelegendary reportage?

I recall the Walled City as one big

playground, especially the rooftops, whereme and my friends would run and jump

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Kowloon Walled City Park.

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from one building to the next, developingstrong calf muscles, a high tolerance ofpain, and control of our fear, and our feet.The rooftops were our domain, shared onlywith the jets that passed overhead almostwithin reach of our outstretched arms asthey roared down the Þnal approach to KaiTak Airport. Among the tangle of TVantennae we hid our kid-valuable things,

toys and things we didnÕt want our parentsto know about because, well, most of themwere stolen or bought with money weearned putting together stuff in the littleone-room ÒfactoriesÓ that were all over theWalled City Ð if our parents knew we hadmoney, theyÕd have taken it. We were goodat hiding things, and ourselves.

Ð Chiu Kin Fung6

Disappearance and Representation:Haunting the RecordWhat does disappearance do to the telling of thatwhich has disappeared? How do we speak to, of,and for the presence of absences in our lives, ourcities?ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊAckbar Abbas, in his book Hong Kong:

Culture and the Politics of Disappearance,meditates at length on disappearance, cities,and images:

A space of disappearance challengeshistorical representation in a special way,in that it is difficult to describe preciselybecause it can adapt so easily to anydescription. It is a space that engendersimages so quickly that it becomesnondescript . . . we can think about anondescript space as that strange thing: anordinary, everyday space that has somehowlost its usual system ofinterconnectedness, a deregulated space.Such a space defeats description notbecause it is illegible and none of thecategories fit, but because it is hyperlegible

and all the categories seem to fit, whetherthey are the categories of social sciences,cultural criticism, or of fiction. Anydescription then that tries to capture thefeatures of the city will have to be, to someextent at least, stretched between fact andfiction . . . If this is the case, then there canbe no single-minded pursuit of the signsthat finishes with a systematic reading ofthe city, only a compendium of indices of

disappearance (like the nondescript) thattakes into account the cityÕs errancy and

that addresses the city through itsheterogeneity and parapraxis.7

A parapraxis is a kind of Freudian slip, aninvoluntary disclosure of something that wouldordinarily be repressed. It could be a joke, ananomaly, a revealing slip-up, a haunting.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWhat does it mean to Òhaunt the recordÓ?When does a presence or a trace become sodeeply etched into a surface that it merits aclaim to durability simply for being so difficult to

repress, resolve, deal with, and put away? Theendurance of multiple claims to land and otherscarce material resources often rests on theapparent impossibility of arranging a palimpsestof signatures and other inscriptions renderedillegible by accumulation over a long time, andacross many generations. In a sense, this is whythe contingent and temporary character of theKowloon Walled City endured for as long as it did.There is of course the delicate irony of the factthat the protection offered by its juridicalanomaly with regard to sovereignty Ð a

constitutional Freudian slip with consequencesÐ was erased the moment Hong Kong reverted toChina. The autonomy of being a wedge of Chinain the middle of Hong Kong became moot themoment Hong Kong was restored to Chinesesovereignty. Resolving the question of HongKongÕs status automatically resolved all doubtsand ambivalences with regard to claims over thecustody and inhabitation of Kowloon Walled City.

A Chinese Sense of Time: NeitherPermanence nor Impermanence

It is appropriate to end with a quotation from aChinese text from the fourth century of theCommon Era, a Madhyamika Mahayana Buddhisttext, The Treatise of Seng Zhao.

When the Sutras say that things pass, theysay so with a measure of reservation, forthey wish to contradict peopleÕs belief inpermanence.

(And here we would gesture in the direction ofthe assumption that this contemporaneity isdestined to be permanent; after all, this too shall

pass).

And when the sutras say that things arelost, they say so with a mental reservationin order to express disapproval of whatpeople understand by Òpassing.Ó

(And here we would gesture in the direction ofthe assumption that this contemporaneity isdestined to oblivion; after all, something fromthis too shall remain).

Their wording may be contradictory, but nottheir aim. It follows that with the sages:

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permanence has not the meaning of thestaying behind, while the wheel of time, orKarma, moves on. Impermanence has notthe meaning of outpassing the wheel.People who seek in vain ancient events inour time conclude that things areimpermanent. We, who seek in vain presentevents in ancient times, see that things arepermanent. Therefore, Buddha, Liberation,

He, it, appears at the proper moment, buthas no fixed place in time.8

What more can we say of contemporaneity? Itappears at the proper moment, but has no fixedplace in time. In that spirit, let us not arrogatesolely to ourselves the pleasures and the perilsof all that is to be gained and lost in living andworking, as we do, in these interesting times.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ×

Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, JeebeshBagchi, Shuddhabrata Sengupta) has been variouslydescribed as artists, media practitioners, curators,researchers, editors, and catalysts of culturalprocesses. Their work, which has been exhibitedwidely in major international spaces and events,locates them squarely along the intersections ofcontemporary art, historical inquiry, philosophicalspeculation, research and theory Ð often taking theform of installations, online and offline media objects,performances and encounters. They live and work in

Delhi, based at Sarai, Centre for the Study ofDeveloping Societies, an initiative they co-founded in2000. They are members of the editorial collective ofthe Sarai Reader series, and have curated "The Rest ofNow" and co-curated "Scenarios" for Manifesta 7.

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ÊÊÊÊÊÊ1 Julieta Aranda, Brian KuanWood, Anton Vidokle, ÒWhat isContemporary Art? Issue OneÓ e-flux journal, no. 11 (December2009), http://e-flux.com/journal/vi ew/96.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ2See Raqs Media Collective,ÒEscapement,Ó an installation atFrith Street Gallery, London, July8, 2009ÐSeptember 30, 2009,http://www.frithstreetgaller

y.com/shows/view/raqs_media_collective_escapement/.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ3Rabindranath Tagore, ÒFirst Talkat Shanghai,Ó in Talks in China(Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1925),quoted in Sisir Kumar Das, ÒTheControversial Guest: Tagore inChinaÓ in Across the HimalayanGap: An Indian Quest for Understanding China, ed. TanChung (Delhi: Indira GandhiNational Centre for the Arts,1998); online version athttp://ignca.nic.in/ks_41037.htm.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ4

Walter Benjamin, The ArcadesProject, trans. Howard Eilandand Kevin McLaughlin(Cambridge, MA: The BelknapPress of Harvard UniversityPress, 1999), 88.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ5Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant in

Art in Theory, 1900Ð1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed.Charles Harrison and Paul Wood,(Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993),456.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ6Chiu Kin Fung, ÒChildren of theWalled City,Ó Asia Literary Review10 (Winter 2008), 72Ð73.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ7M. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong:Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press,1997), 73Ð74.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ8Chao Lun: The Treatise of Seng-chao, trans. Walter Liebenthal(Hong Kong: Hong KongUniversity Press, 1968).

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Raqs Media Collective - Now and Elsewhere