"Another world is not only possible, she is on her way.
Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day,
if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing."
­­­­- Arundhati Roy

On Cables and Cumulus combines drawing and textile work, expanded over three floors. Through the recognition that all technologies are extensions of ourselves, the theme of technological acceleration and its impact on the planet, nature and societies is explored within the works. Completely entangled in the technological systems that we ourselves have created, the focus of this work is on the visualization and collective making of two important aspects of technologies that are invisible and interwoven.
The first work, At Depth the Bending / Old New World, is a map drawn in coloured pencil realised together with the artist Sumantra Mukherjee and his team. The work shows contemporary, abstracted fibre-optic cables that carry global data, which are secured on the oceans floor. These cables accurately mirror logbook data of ancient shipping routes from the 17th and 18th Century which are drawn in blue pencil. The two elements juxtaposed in one drawing show how closely the physicality of our technology is still linked to the routes of the colonial matrix and imperial modernity.
The second work Myth, Knowledge, Industrial Logic looks at the misleading central metaphor today for the internet: the cloud. Far removed from the romantic notion of the cloud, today’s clouds are not weightless, amorphous or invisible they are existing physical infrastructures, both environmental, political and opaque.
The seventeen-metre textile hanging is digitally collaged from drawn clouds. It includes envisaged and imaginary power lines, embroidered collectively with Neelanjana Ghosh and her team of embroiderers on site, using silver and copper threads. These lines act as a metaphor for the creation of new routes and networks, a portal to another world.

Client: Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan
Location: Kolkata, India
Completion Date: 2022

Proposal developed by invitation

Project on e-flux