Allied Studies, Apurva Talpade
The Scribe and the Labyrinth / Practices Around the Everyday

Some thoughts on individual practices:
How are you able to be critical of your energetic selves?

Atisha Bhuta / Sanskriti___:
How do you harness the energetic self that emerges on the walks to script the walk? How is walking a way of knowing? How does your familiarity help you navigate? What are the other landmarks, the other stories, the details that you're able to gather from these walks?


Charmi Mehta:
The various, linked series of invisible everydays of your mother are what you're setting out to explore. What have been the evolutions of her routines? How are you able to piece together her life through her memories, her descriptions of events and spaces, the shifts that caused changes in her everyday? How are you able to present her and produce her beyond your relationship with her, through all the lives she has lived? You have a nice ability to narrate, but also please find ways to use her own authorship, her own telling of these things - through video, audio, multiple mediums. They need not be staged, you can intersperse them with everyday conversations you have been doing so far. Remember, a historical unravelling of a close family member also allows you to locate yourself (and your politics and practices) at a particular moment.

Yashita Ugavekar:
In the same way that drawing as a practice is not held in exercise books which are instructional, but rather look elsewhere - towards environments and observations and interactions as the field, in the same way you have to define the field for yourself. Your relationship with it can be oriented towards experimenting with the practice of writing itself, but if you stay with simply the letters, or the "quick brown fox" sentence, you will exhaust your energies with this very soon. Rather, if you make that exercise book completely full of a series of experiments with writing - fragments from eavesdropping, excerpts from book, or simply the script (in Telugu), then the book itself will be able to hold the everyday and it will become the beginning of an experiment based practice.

Shreya Mehta/ Jhanvi Gupta/ Aditya Bhoite:
The three of you are clubbed together here because all of you have existing drawing practices in which you need to intervene by a) not thinking of the drawing as a production but rather as a process, b) using the book / scraps of paper as containing experiments and possibilities and directions, and c) looking beyond an image as subject matter towards your own lives. This means that you energetically observe your everydays and also develop drawing as a practice that accompanies you in your everyday. This does not mean that you only draw what you observe in the outside world, you could just as easily draw fictional landscapes, dreams, things only you have collaged together in your imaginations, etc etc.


Neha Mhadolkar:
There is a certain stiffness that is coming into how you're putting together these alternate characters from the stories. They are getting reduced to attributes, this one has such and such powers, such and such weapons, etc., while the practice of this in your life is significantly different. It is much softer, much dreamier, it involves daydreams and escapes and retellings of stories. You inhabit these other worlds through these stories themselves, then how would you write them? It doesn't have to become a story in any traditional sense - you don't have to write for an audience. Write for yourself, don't introduce characters, and let's see the landscape of those escapes.


Vanshita Purvankar:
If there is a tendency or a new practice that you want to explore, use the idea of how you construct / remember a space to explore that! Do it for your house, your neighbourhood, your walks, places that you've visited once, places you keep returning to. What are you able to pull from them? What stays with you? How do you expand on that, or, what gets made from a retelling through that lens?

Currently, the exhaustive documentation of the series of texts that surround us, that mostly escape us is interesting because a) it's how you mentioned you see a place or a route and b) it opens up a completely new way to see the street, see a place. You're at liberty to explore it however you want to.

Kartiki Mahadik:
Since your field is now that of solidarities and friendships, what you're putting together is a collection of your interactions with people that are peripheral (not un-integral) to your everyday. So essentially, relationships and exchanges outside of those instituted by families and schools, etc - your conversations with strangers, occasional friends, people outside of the circles of your class etc and other such interactions that escape immediate classifications.


Astha Desai:
How do you make a map of the society / neighbourhood through a collection of the strange tendencies, habits and stories of these individuals. How is the myth of the rationality of everyday life shattered through this book / drawing / map / network diagram that is able to plot alliances and affairs, traditions and conventions, personal rituals, gossips, and perhaps most importantly, fictions that lurk beneath the idea of the civilised.

The sense of the arbitrary classification and the coming together of an incongruous collection of sketches (here, written sketches) like what was discussed in class yesterday, would be useful in helping you classify / organise this.


Govinda Aggarwal:
There is a quote by Walter Benjamin which goes “Ownership is the most intimate relation that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him but he who comes alive in them.” How then would you find a way to speak of your objects such that they tell the story of your everyday? Through anecdotes? Extensive documentation? Individual routines of the objects themselves? How do you open up yourself through your objects?

Rishabh Debnath:
An opening up of the self is required through your notes. How would you construct a sense of time, place, belonging and unbelonging, yearning and desire through a thickening of your notes? Remember, the songs are not defining your life or controlling it in an obvious way. Like we discussed in class, yes you can feel sad when you listen to a sad song, but this kind of amassing is very surface level. Rather, use the shifts in songs to document more about your life. We can figure out how the song/playlist helps in giving it a form later.

Drishti Desai:
The unconscious or the subconscious or the terrain of dreams / daydreams becomes the field. How are you able to hold it? Of course these things are fleeting and evade our capacity to capture them. The more you pursue it, the less available it makes itself. However, this layer is an extremely important layer of our lives and you should not seek to represent it as a whole (for example, as a narrative with a beginning and an end), but as fleeting fragments, as snippets as and when they occur to you, as brief descriptions of the spaces of dreams, as sudden changes in the train of our thoughts, as recurring ideas that haunt us, things that keep returning in memory, etc etc etc etc.


Radhika Malekar:
How would you build an extensive body of work through the stories that build your neighbourhood? Where you unpack the neighbourhood through small myths, strange affiliations, specific practices, exchanges, that build a narrative that is thick and resists a reductive, statistical retelling of life. What this seeks to do is see the everyday as rife with, and essentially constituted of these energetic existences that are continuously negotiating and transforming. Your own self is the one that is able to transform and closely inspect a macro narrative and sees the individual as located in the coming together of a specific set of stories.


Ruthveek Gangasagar:
How do you use the idea of the collage practice - taking photographs, writing lyrically about your life, bringing together your observations as well as the self that collects practices?

Aditi ___:
How do you pass through multiple existences, parallel realities by scripting alternative selves for everyone you meet? On an analysis of these stories, how would you assess where your own self is located? For the moment though, please continue with an energetic pursuit of this collection.