House of Opaque Water

After a long careful look, the man says, “This is my home”. He is in a boat, surrounded by water on all sides. He points to the surface of the water about 6 meters away from him. His house and his village were swallowed up by the water amongst the depleting mangroves of the Sundarbans in India. His companion points to another part of the sea, “ This is school and this is the path that leads to our friend’s house”. We see nothing only the swirling waters around the boat. He wants to document the narratives of the villagers.

Tehri in the hills is another town in the North, the dam’s reservoir completely submerged Tehri Town and 40 villages. “We can’t sing songs with women of neighboring villages, they are dispersed far off”. Rehabilitation process had divided families and destroyed community relations and links among villages.

He wants the former villagers to reconstruct in miniature clay-sculptures their homes and streets, and narrate their stories. The sculpture will be cast in a translucent material. The sculpture will be illumined from within and on a dark night, in a rite of reclamation their homes and streets will rise out of the water. There is no true returning, no true reclamation, but this ‘experiential reclamation’ will be a healing rite. 

This is not going to be a documentary, a docu-fiction or visual anthropology. He will begin with a real person, a real event to explore the psychology and poetics of shelter/home. In the house memory-image we are in possession of a veritable principle of psychological integration. The house, the shelter and other spaces of lived-experience as a topography of our intimate being is what he wants to explore.