Provisions for Everybody
Single screen, Video, 50 minutes, Furniture
2018
Provisions for Everybody inscribes an eccentric itinerary on and off the trail of George Orwell that accompanies a reading of ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’. Traveling between Northern England, Eastern India, Myanmar (Burma) and
Catalonia, Raqs pause at Wigan Pier (in England) where Orwell queried the future, at Motihari (in Bihar, India) where he was born in the shadow of an opium godown, on the road from Mandalay where he began to understand the operations of force, in the neighborhoods of Newcastle and Durham where he investigated coal mining and miners, and in the streets of Barcelona, where he dodged bullets.
En-route, Raqs think about how time gets its names from materials, how we burn and become fuel, and about what can be learnt from pigs, donkeys and a taxidermied elephant. They burrow under the earth, find a memorial to the Buddha’s celebration of doubt next to sugarcane fields, survey an open cast coal mine, consider planetary motion, observe the ghosts of opium and indigo, study line dancing, and find everything ablaze from neolithic times till the present.