Thickets

“Being anywhere inside a thicket means having to deal with a tango between tenses, between the consequences of what yesterday has done, and what tomorrow will bring, and what the present proposes, all at the same time.”

Moving between the sit-ins at Shaheen Bagh, the farmers’ protests, and pandemic lockdowns, Raqs invokes the thicket as a metaphor for entangled solidarities and overlapping temporalities. The text explores how gatherings—of people, of memory, of presence—interrupt linear time and clear-cut narratives, giving rise to a more complex, layered experience of history and futurity.

Text by Raqs, published in ‘Slow Reader: A Resource for Design Thinking and Practice’, 2021