BIRDING UTOPIA(S)

 Climate catastrophes explode.
          Dystopic futures linger.
    Rupture and resistance arise
          Utopia(s) are designed – multiple imaginations
        of shared futures collaborate.
In the here-and-now, to get from here-to-there.

This art-performance sets in motion the exploration of social possibilities and processes of ‘birding utopia(s)’ in our time. Birding, in this performance, involves the enactment of transgression on limits to species and gender, South-North-East-West, race and class, body and beyond. Birds traverse the sun, land, wind, water, marketplaces, alongside cruises and in cages. They lend wings to human transgressions; shape insomniac dreams. Birds inspire a reading and enactment of defiance. The defiance of ‘natural’ borders between human and bird is directed towards imagining ‘social’ transformation. Artists foment utopia(s) through embodied ruminations. Using suspended artwork on cloth, chequered movement and soundscapes, they re-tell tales of bird-human transmigrations as they challenge borders, enabling their crossing but also their dwelling.     

Curated by academic and journalist Aheli Moitra, this is an interdisciplinary collaboration exploring artists from the periphery of the global South and North. Visual artist and writer Parismita Singh presents a site-specific artwork that engages with the work of theatre artist Lapdiang Artimai Syiem, who combines bodily movement with original soundscapes and music by Dibakar Saha and Apkyrmenskhem Tangsong, respectively. After months of brainstorming in digital space, this collaboration is being brought to life for the first time in its entirety through a live performance at Oslo Mela.

The performance binds the collaborators, as birds of varied feather, into the enactment of possibilities in catastrophic times. Joy, anger, despair, hope and struggle intersect in the push for utopian futures. Folk lore passed on through generations narrate ruptures in time and through border crossing disruptions of human-bird creatures. Two poems by Khasi author and translator, Esther Syiem, inspire the enactment: ‘Who Rules the Roost?’ and ‘Portentous Crowing’. The performer embodies the act alongside objects of daily use – a jaiñkyrshah (all-purpose drape) and a murha (low chair).   

Artists of birding utopia(s) inhabit peripheries of geography, gender, race and class. As collaboration, their performance builds from concrete experiences and action. In the Global South, climate catastrophes explode in real time – floods, storms, rising seas, inequality, interspecies conflict and the return of genocidal violence. In the Global North, the warming of the Arctic, dwindling livelihoods, and discriminations that further marginalize vulnerable populations. The two spheres are interwoven. Overconsumption, theft and accumulation – material and intellectual – in the Global North; extraction and dispossession – crumbling earth, melting bodies – in the Global South. Capital cuts across spheres through finance capital, extractive technology and repressive legislation. Borders are for the oppressed – the polite, coerced, consumers of the dystopia produced.   

When art is resistance, as in this example, it must struggle at every step to cross these borders – to meet, ideate, mediate, scrouge for funds, get along, get visas, get rejected, travel from the village behind the mountain on one end of the planet to the other periphery of civilization. A collaboration such as this involves intense dedication to utopia(s); the persistence to push boundaries towards weaving them into forms relevant to the times. It needs common grounds and friendships that can common grounds. It needs willing collaborators in positions of power. It needs a receptive audience to believe in the (im)possibility presented. It needs collective traction – artist with audience – to turn winds.   

The Oslo Mela provides the dwelling in which this art-performance rests. Their support pushed the ideas and actions required in birding utopia(s). In effect, the Oslo Mela is re-shaped, much as it re-shapes how we imagine and experience Oslo and Norway. More feathers unite. From here, this art-performance travels on to currently unknown destinations. Through multiple forms; to audiences that span the streets to libraries, farms, universities and parliaments. For whoever needs to get from here to there in their exploration of concrete transformations.   

Through action and imagination.
Set in motion. As collaboration.

---

About the artists

Parismita Singh. Photo: Nassif Ahmed

Parismita Singh (b. 1980) is a prominent Indian writer, artist, educator and graphic novelist based in Assam, Northeast India. She is widely recognized for her distinctive voice, weaving together the cultural, political, and everyday realities of the region. She works across genres, of fiction, non-fiction graphic reportage, comics, and multi-media art; and explores themes of identity, conflict, migration, memory, craft cultures and pedagogy. 

Lapdiang Artimai Syiem. Photo: Kehsav Pariat

Lapdiang Artimai Syiem (b. 1988) is a theatre artist from Meghalaya, India. She received her training from the National School of Drama, New Delhi and the Commedia School, Copenhagen, specializing in physical theatre. Her practice draws from Khasi folklore and the oral narratives of her community, reinterpreting and adapting them into a contemporary context. Her work continues to challenge the realities around her matrilineal community, which has been influenced by various factors over the years, such as the rights and resistance of women, issues of extraction of resources and transcultural relationships. 

Aheli Moitra. Photo: Liudmila Nikanorova

Aheli Moitra (b. 1984), an academic and journalist from India currently living in Tromsø, curated this art-performance. Her practice was built through reporting the news from the fields, forests, roads, town halls, churches, camps, festivals, checkpoints, schools, shops, hospitals and homes of Northeast India. Growing up in Delhi, Muscat and Mumbai, academic encounters in Nottingham, Kathmandu, Dimapur and Tromsø have also shaped her engagement with the conditions and practices of belonging, exclusion, oppression and resistance. 

---