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As the world turns, so does the deaf ear of power. Watching, not listening, the marksman locates a target. Bang Bang.

A Measure of Anacoustic Reason registers our thinking about forms of reasoning that insulate themselves from listening. The word anacoustic refers to a zone in the atmosphere where air particles are too distant from each other to be able to allow for the conduction of sound. It also denotes any environment, device or condition that effectively blocks out sound. The term ‘measure’ suggests the deployment or operation of such forms of reason (as in ‘measures taken’) as well as an account or audit of the acts of reason that are realized in the form of measurements. It is, in that sense, a measure of measuring. The installation sees the act of ‘turning a deaf ear’, as the unwillingness or inability to listen to the voices that refuse to be accommodated into the master narratives of progress, of instrumental reason and the domestication of space through the geomancy of corporations and nation-states. In this turning away lies an aggressive disavowal of the possibility of the humanity of other forms of expressions and speaking about the world, that privilege realities and experiences that cannot, or need not be counted.

Log Book Entry Before Storm is a site specific installation that unfolds within a house once split in two, divided by a concrete wall, to accommodate two families. The work reactivates this space by perforating the wall and reopening the possibility of movement, thought, and exchange. Around this restructuring of space emerges the dream-like and affective experience of the installation. Through this spatial intervention, the work invites flows of air, light, sound, depth, and imagination into the interiors of the house.  

Fragments of sea and signal enter the space: a lighthouse beams from afar, a deep-sea diver hovers mid-thought, and a monitor at the entrance pulses in Morse code. This coded transmission speaks across distances into the installation, and outwards, in dialogue with a plaque mounted on the Vypeen Light House in Kochi. A cabinet becomes a passageway. Fossilised ammonites on windowsills point to a time when the world’s tallest mountains serves as ocean floors. A rendition of the drawing of ‘Riemann Surface’, an endlessly looping form with no inside or outside, echoes the work’s recursive sensibility. Log Book Entry Before Storm charts a porous terrain between separation and continuity, domestic memory and oceanic drift.