you are in the same atmosphere as me

Copier-Paper, Magnet, Copper Wire, Audio-Electronics
2022

A collage of photo-copy prints of drawings is made into a speaker with a tiny magnet and some copper wires. The aggregate-body of copier-papers vibrates, disturbing the air around them to produce an audio which speaks "you are in the same atmosphere as me". The words reason for Equality or Same-ness. As the sound loops, it appears more and more ambiently distorted.

When ambient distortions consume the words, the paper-apparattus vibrates more and more stressfully, struggling harder and harder, to speak the same words. While the meaning of words obscure, the ambient distortion makes the materiality of the copier-paper become present in its struggle.

A substance lost to the spectre of imitative commonness (copy) becomes Present, when it does a thing it was not manufactured to do. 

1. Becoming: The word Bahujan forms an emancipatory identity for ‘backward’ caste people. It translates to ‘many people’ but means ‘becoming many’ or ‘becoming other’.

2. A paper speaker 

3. Drawings in the work are from my daily journal, expressing scenes of migration, dehumanisation, objectification, dissociation and make-shiftness.