Log Book Entry Before Storm

Raqs Media Collective was founded in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. In their own words, Raqs are: “...artists, occasional curators and philosophical agent provocateurs.” In installations, films, performances and other investigations that spiral outwards from the city of Delhi, Raqs Media Collective engages with time, how it flows and the life cycles of things and ideas.

Log Book Entry Before Storm (2014) is a site-specific installation that occupies what was once a peculiar domestic space– a single house cut in two by a concrete wall to accommodate two families. The artists reintroduce circulation into this still interior by perforating the intervening wall and introducing the possibility of movement. Around this restructuring of space emerges the dream-like and affective experience of the installation. According to the artists, the aim was to create a space where circulations of all kind —air, light, sound, depth and ideas— could be made possible. Within this submersive experience appear elements, like a mysterious deep sea-diver and a lighthouse signaling to ships at sea, that draw the ocean into the interior space.

At the entry to the installation, a suspended monitor speaks in Morse code, commonly used for communication by lighthouses. It is set up in conversation with a plaque installed on the Vypeen Light House in Kochi. A cabinet acts as a passageway between the two halves of the house. On windowsills on the left half, images of ammonite fossils recovered from high altitudes point to a past moment when the world’s tallest mountains served as ocean floors. A drawing here is the rendition of a ‘Riemann Surface’– a form that infinitely loops itself, with no beginning or end and no inside or outside.