A Migrant Walk, 26m20s, 2022
The video and performance work, ‘A Migrant Walk’ is a “documentary caricature” of Bertolt Brecht’s radio play ‘Lindbergh’s flight,’ which was based on Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic journey from America to Europe on a primitive airplane.In the video, a question cuts through the contradictory movement of history: how to present the impossible migrant walk within the possible limits of our communicative means including those fabulous ones that are devised anew each day on the social media?
The impossible is continuously reduced to image, story and sensation while the fundamental historical question remains unaddressed: how is such a reality to be thought within the experience of social and economic contradictions on a global scale so graphically exposed by the pandemic?
The video/ performance work does not pretend to overcome the present impasse but it presents and traverses the impasse itself in its caricatural historicity. At the level of the actual and localized construction of our collaboration it can be called an improvised document of our concrete lives today as they are shared by and cut off from each other, shared in their being cut off from each other.
writer, director / Soumyabrata Choudhury co-director / Priyanka Chhabra curators / Anuja Ghosalkar, Kai Tuchmann commissioned by / Brechtfestival Augusberg
