Surfaces are friendly, hospitable to narratives. They invite, cajole, contain, hold. Walls as you walk along the streets, table tops in classrooms and cafes, the insides of buses and trams, margins of pages in books, palms of your hand. They contain markings of location, of experiences, gestures, practices. Surfaces don't have insides and outsides, but textures and edges.

Stories travel to surfaces and rest, waiting to be picked up and be carried to different destinations, to find themselves in different biographies, to be in circulation. Inscribe a surface with a scratch, a scribble, a sketch, a snippet, a phrase, a snatch of reality. And watch as strangers are drawn to stop by, to add their stories to yours. These acts of inscription are centrifugal acts - a play of unravelling and revealing, that is accretive. Surfaces are such palimpsests of meanings and signs, layered over time. Peel off the layers one by one, and be connected with a map of co-travellers.

This tapestry of animations that you see projected on the wall is one such surface of the enigmatic inner worlds of stories and rhythms. Within it, each individual animation an overlapping of layers of meaning that are held together through movement over time. What does the surface tell? Move to the edges of the map. What do they reveal? Before coming here, had you thought of a place like this?

CREDITS

Animations and sound recordings by : Azra, Bobby, Babli, Naseem Bano, Manoj, Masooma, Mehrunisa, Nasreen, Nilofer, Rabiya, Shahana, Shamsher, Sultana, Suraj, Yashoda at Compughar @ LNJP, Delhi

Installation realised by : Ashish Mahajan, Mrityunjay Chatterjee, Shveta at Cybermohalla @ Sarai

Acknowledgments : T. Meyarivan for scripting

Produced @ Sarai Media Lab, Sarai-CSDS.