The word ‘para’ gestures to a relationship to that which a thing stands beside, or at a tangent to. In our ‘para-practices’ are writings that we do, and conversations that we enter into, alongside. It could be the making of a Sourcebook for staging public discursive moments for a plural knowledge world, or a Curation, a processual duration with many to re-apprehend the world, or a Studio with students to reimagine the power of margins or thresholds.

Practising Collectivity: What is possible and not yet forbidden?

This interview reflects on the conditions, thresholds, and frictions that shape collective work—within and beyond institutions, publics, and time. Raqs draws from their own processes to consider how collectivity is practiced, stretched, and sometimes tested. The conversation thinks through the limits of what can be done together, and what remains open, despite constraint. Published in […]

Yours, Sincerely (2022)

Essay as a part of Half-Life, a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Art Institute of Chicago within the context of its exhibition “Static Range” by Himali Singh Soin

salt

Text and image essay by Raqs, published in The Drama Review, Volume 65 Issue 4, 2021

Freeing the Weight of the Habitual

This essay examines how established practices and ingrained habits can both confine and shape creative and curatorial processes. It poses the question, “What is the mechanism — and how do we seek it — of ‘freeing’ the weights of habitual narrative entrapments?” prompting questions related to the forms and premises of the “system ofgovernance” that […]

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 […]

The Event-Shaped Hole and the Photographic Image

“The image making and processing capacity happen continuously, just as respiration, or digestion does, The new image machines breathe, digest, dream and excrete pictures. they don’t just ‘take’ them.” This essay introduces Raqs’ concept of the “event-shaped hole,” suggesting that photographs can act as pieces of evidence, even when the events themselves are absent from […]

The double act of Flower time

“This paradox of memory is a negotiation between having to remember, the obligation tomourn, the uncertainty of moments and conditions of its activation, the inability to recall, andthe slow grinding requirement to forget and move on.“ This essay reflects on the complex relationship between memory, war, and public art. Drawing upon historical events and personal […]

Ten Nonillion Particles and Five Million Incidents

In this essay, Raqs Media Collective frames COVID‑19 through a scalar lens, noting that an estimated 10³¹ (ten nonillion) viral particles float in the air at any moment—making viruses the planet’s most abundant “bad news” relative to human ‘newsworthiness.’By juxtaposing this microscopic ubiquity with five million documented pandemic incidents, the text underscores how a seemingly […]

Recensions, Without Originals

This essay uses the concept of “recension”—ongoing revision—to reflect on three decades of Raqs Media Collective’s practice amid economic turmoil, social unrest, and a mounting pandemic. Tracing moments from the creation of Sarai’s public‑sharing infrastructures and early social‑software experiments, it argues that creative and curatorial work is sustained through collective re‑apprehension, infrastructural generosity, and the […]

Antahshira

This essay takes a Bengali term anta(h)shira—used to denote an intravenous vein—as its starting point, treating it as a metaphor for the subtle, capillary-like currents that run through bodies and social imaginaries. The text unpacks how such culturally embedded words defy neat translation, revealing fissures in our shared vocabularies. It argues for a practice of continual […]