process report on ongoing projects

1 Butchering the Text
1.1 Intro & Concept Note
1.2 Excerpt from Mahmood’s Interview
1.3 Documented Images and Rawhide Parchment production

Butchering the Text 

is an ongoing project which furthers zeropowercut’s engagement with disenfranchised productive knowledge, inter-caste-action, and locating sudrafication/de-intelligentialization

Butchering is a form of high-precision knowledge yet “butchering” means “to sabotage something by doing it really badly”, or worse, “to kill people in a very violent way or in large numbers“. 

Brahmanical disempowerment of productive knowledge (like butchering) ontologises material work, and workers as “Sudra”, a term which means “naturally knowledge-less and menial”. 

Against this caste-oppressive disempowerment, the project presents “butchering” as an intersection of knowledge, materiality, and making. 

The ongoing project has 2 process based components–

1 research-fieldwork and documentary

2 material production (rawhide parchment) for installation production

presenting work-in-progress: audio excerpts from Mahmood Alam’s interviews with subtitle-text translations. In this excerpt Mahmood talks about his tools and their materials.

The research-fieldwork and documentary aspect of the project includes interviews of artisans: butchers, tool makers, leather based musical-instrument makers, musicians, and (nose-to-tail) food-makers. The presentation of the artisanal-speech is guided by how Work is a network of people and knowledge that care for each-other’s craft and comfort. 


material making process from my studio:

documentation from Mahmood Alam’s studio:

Ongoing material production from artisanal grounds: exploring the process of butchering, tool making, and rawhide making, through documentation as well as by making some of the materials myself.