The Body In Question

January 28th

Mapping unknown territories.
Where do our territories intersect with those of other people?
Is it through common experience?
Does the body perceive similarly what every person’s mind conceives differently?
Through these experiences- we, each in our own way,
Construct realities.

“The foreigner has no self.”
Which part of us is foreign to us? Foreign to what? Foreign to the rest of ourselves?
Is being foreign- a feeling of disconnectedness and seclusion from the ‘whole’?
When does the foreigner reveal itself to us?




………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Just an aside.
The night I read Kristeva, I dreamt of Raymond from Albert Camus’ The Stranger.
I was taking Raymond to the psychiatrist for therapy. My relationship with Raymond remained unestablishd throughout the dream. The psychiatrist was not at the clinic and so in an attempt to get in touch with her, I tried to call her from the clinic phone. But the attendant wouldn’t help me and in all this confusion, Raymond managed to escape and run away. I lost Raymond.
And then I wandered around on the streets (of Bombay, near Churchgate station!) looking for Raymond. While I was wandering about, I ended up at a stall selling stoles and scarves. I remembered that I was supposed to be looking for Raymond only when I bumped into Avy (faculty at Srishti) who emerged from the station among a bunch of commuters. Avy helped me look for Raymond, but we failed to find him. At this point the dream kind of transited into another dream.

Speeks the truth

January 27th

Freedom
Duty
Criticism
Danger
Truth
Frankness

Reason enough to speak the truth.

Fearless speech exists in my diary. For in it I speak the truth. Mend myself.
I make myself vulnerable.
Before you die of curiosity, (either you don’t take much interest in that kind of trivia, or you’ve given up, or you’ve just plain forgotten) tell you why this blog is called schneiderspeek.
Schneider is a dear friend who listens.
But Schneider has now found a little space on this www.
Schneider speeks.


Can you be a parrhesiastes if you speak the truth for yourself? Does it apply to oneself?

Problematization of the moment.
Incomplete.

Republic Day of the nation

January 26th tick tick formerly known only as the Republic Day of the nation.
Renamed, due to a severe impression on my memory by a giant earthquake, Earthquake Survival Day.

I have dreamt of the death of my parents several times. It bothers me terribly. I fail to understand its significance.
Do people undergo therapy for the trauma they experience when they lose people close to them?
Why are we reading ‘trauma and recovery’ by Judith Herman?
Where does something stop being an exercise? A piece of reading that has been given ‘as part of Sanjit’s course?’ I would have read this essay anytime. Because it has significance to how we treat our lives. We’re all therapists, in a way. Otherwise, we would be one messed up mass.
I’m relieving myself off the day, when I speak to my roommate. We have testimonies to share everyday. Some of us choose not to share them. And then we have different ways of recovering.

How can art and design aid in recovery related to trauma?

As designers, we’re venturing into new spaces, many of which deal with people who have undergone trauma. It is extremely important to go into these spaces with informed views on how to conduct and interview, even a conversation with someone who has undergone a traumatic experience.

Can we design products, spaces, experiences that aid in recovery related to trauma?

Shrink-in-me.

lost in a city

January 25th
I had never gotten lost in a city.
This is a log that I had written after a day of wandering around Bangalore. My experience of a derive in Bangalore city.


………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….


At about 10 this morning, my angst burst through in a stream of uncontrollable tears. A half hour later, after I was urged to immerse myself in a medium, to understand a language, I was on my way home to pick up rolls of black and white film. I was going to tend to my self through my own eyes. Everyone’s out there just waiting to let you know yourself better.
I went out to shoot photographs, and I ended up capturing thoughts, stories, and moments. It felt like I was finally talking to people.
I haven’t even developed my photographs yet, but what I am about to narrate is my day’s experience, of having done something like I was doing it for the first time.
So I haven’t shot with my SLR for over two years now. Photography, to me was a new medium all over again today.
On my way to the city, I wondered where I wanted most to go and shoot. A place that I’ve never been to before. But in a city, that’s often hard to find. I ventured into the majestic city area of Bangalore, with the challenge of finding suitably exciting frames in an extremely crowded place. There was no empty space. The moment the bus pulled into the bus stop, I was reminded of Bombay all over again.
I remember having spoken to a photographer called chirordeep that I’d once met in Bombay. And he had mostly shot in Bombay, and his photographs at first conveyed a certain calm and empty space which I didn’t relate to Bombay, and so they seemed untrue to the subject. But that evening on my way back home, I thought once again of his photographs, played them in my mind, and then I realized that he seemed to have actually, through the emptiness, captured the moments of solace that we all seek in a city. Spaces of emptiness and calm that we long for but don’t seem to find easily.
I was looking for images with interesting light conditions. Throughout the day, I met different kinds of people. People who were intrigued by the looks of a girl wandering about bravely with a camera, some who were a little annoyed because maybe I was breaching some sort of dog –like boundaries that they had created in this vast public arena. Some asked me what I was doing, where I was from, and why I was shooting photos. A lot of people asked me to shoot a picture of them and eagerly posed for me.
I had to pretend to take photographs of many and then nod and smile like I had taken a picture of them.
I apologized to a guard in an underpass subway, for having appreciated some beautiful light that was trickling into the otherwise dark and dingy subway.
In the flower market, a shopkeeper told me something in kannada, I’m afraid I don’t know what he said, but his flailing arms said, “go away from here”.
This makes me wonder, what the people who sit in these same places every single day, think when a stranger walks into these spaces, not to buy anything or meet anyone, but just for a few moments to point a camera at them. Am I breaking some kind of norm? Disrupting someone’s peaceful existence? Being a little superficial?
After a point, I lost all sense of direction and therefore control. I let myself wander around.
In the market, I was accompanied by a drunken man for some distance. He insisted on pursuing a conversation with me. He first tried to speak in kannada, then in Tamil, then in Hindi and finally in some broken English! After some time I had to tell him to stop following me.
A little distance away, I met my next door neighbour.
At a park, I was able to communicate to a woman, who had longed for someone to speak to her in that very language for 15 days.
And I’m back home now, where I’m most comfortable.
I do feel an inkling of satisfaction. I think somewhere I found some spirit.



………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….


“From the lack of discipline emerges surprise,
the unforeseeable and the capacity for investigation,
not in order to corroborate an intuition
but to discover unimagined outcomes.”

January 24th

Sudden attack.

Failed attempts to express myself. I’ve often wondered why it is that the only times that I feel like writing, or capturing my thoughts, are times when I ‘feel’ something deeply or intensely, or even severely. All other attempts seem to be an awful tug of war with myself. This is an attempt to capture my thoughts as the week proceeds, dot dot dot

When I think back of when I first stumbled upon the term ‘art’, it takes me way back to art class in school. When I made pretty drawings and gifted them to people, that was an act of wholeness for me. And I could communicate through this act.
Estella Majozo speaks of the dream space, and it made me think of the concept of involuntary memory that I had read about recently. It is infact a concept that I like very much. Scott Lash explains that involuntary memory is something that you can’t quite grasp, something that you’re reaching for, or searching for. Something that might be lost. And it is also in the unconscious and dream like. Involuntary memory is the symbolic. It is our lost childhood. And in a way in our conscious state we are always reaching out into our involuntary memory to make sense of what we are.
But involuntary memory is something that is forgotten and from the past. Then can we have access to this kind of memory only through our dreams? Is it possible to reach out to it in our conscious state?

We are nostalgic about our past. We have memories of our past. But is it possible to be nostalgic about the future? In a sense, it is different from fantasy. A fantasy of the future becomes a memory. Isn’t it possible then to be nostalgic about the future?
The way we make sense of the world brings us to the concept of identity. Through our dreams we make sense of our identity. And therefore our identity has much to do with our past and what is lost. And it is also our perception of everyday things which seep into our memory, become memory, and surface to reveal our identity.
Memory. Marks. Identity.