Inertia: Being Both Twice.

 

Inertia is the string of force that holds the moon around the earth, channeling light to your dark parts; it is what keeps us spinning around each other, it is my constant love for you.

It's those moments on the dining table when the conversation blurs and you're still eating, but your mind has roamed Rome, wandered West, imagined an island and named it, Locomotion. Then someone swipes the linen from beneath the cutlery, and even as we ironically live in some postcolonial dream, everything remains intact.

Or those moments when a bus jerks to a halt and you bend over to accommodate stasis even as you are still moving.

Or when the plates below your land shift and the land insists on holding forth, just barely letting a fault line here or a crease there show.

Perhaps more than the shaky straddle between two worlds moving at differing speeds, Inertia is about keeping our balance. It is about allowing the illogical, surreal state of stationary momentum or moving stillness to live in yet another realm, a realm in which it recognizes its state of limbo--one leg on land, another in the water, one brain in numbers, another in abstraction--and channels it with maximum energy. A hummingbird in flight, on a stationary plane.

This issue on inertia follows four stories of artists and designers living in this state of inertia--between times, speeds, places and ideas.

Carol Singh listens to the quake of the world of clothing design, and explores how what we wear might actually be depicting how we feel. How the current beneath us might be reflected in the sky above. She employs geological metaphors to capture the tectonic shifts of dressing, and wonders whether we must settle into time or whether it is time to settle for another pace.

Henry Peck and Meara Sharma speak to CAMP about transient spaces, their shifting projects and their fixed ideologies. They couldn't have described them better: "Imbued with seemingly endless possibilities, the name CAMP comes to mean nothing. Or rather, it means everything. The constantly regenerating ‘purpose’ of CAMP questions the idea that the intentions of an organization can be predetermined, or even knowable at all. CAMP resists inertia (Instead, it aspires toward infinity). This disarticulation– and subsequent transfiguration – of a fixed idea, place or system  – is a regular feature of CAMP’s work."

Somesh Kumar wanders between street and silence, sketching his city as it wanders past him. He tells us about archiving a scene in his memory as he sketches, hand a few steps behind head, and what it is like to live through the subjects on his page.

Finally, Nandan Ghiya converses with Veeranganakumari Solanki about digitalizing the old, making the new antique and making music. Nandan parodies a culture formed by pixels, while Veerangana reveals her process as curator, perhaps best exemplified in the hoof and hilt of her other love--though she denies the connection--for equestrian life.

Our stories themselves set us off at a kind of momentum, then jerk, stop, abruptly derail us into confronting the truth of our disorderly path. We must not resist the resistance that our minds and bodies put up, in order to remain. All four stories attempt, finally, at preserving a deeper understanding of our present state, as does inertia.

And then there's light- how it remains in inertia, always a particle, always a wave, traveling long after it has left its source, constantly moving towards that earth from which it can and can no longer see.

Kinestatically,

Himali.