Bombay Tilts Down
13m 14s looped, seven channel environment
2022
Six moves that begin in unstable skies and at sea, and descend “into the ordinary” via a vertical landscape filled with unfinished city landmarks, persistent settlements, details without end. A landscape movie in facets, filmed by remotely controlled CCTV camera from atop a 34-floor building in central Mumbai.
Each tilt downwards is made from dozens of repeated shots that show and hide themselves. They become a fluid movement across categories, structures and lines made on land, an interest of CAMP for many years. The stacked and layered city in Parel and Worli (old Bombay tidal islands, and later forming the working-class heart of the city) is suggestive of new subject and object formations.
When people appear in the images, many of them seem to be aware of this eye or hole in the sky. Everyone is, or can be an actor, in diagonal pacts between people and camera. The potential of such new relations drives this work, part of long-term investigations at CAMP that include histories and futures of moving images, housing, infrastructure, and pleasure.
The work has music, haunted by sirens and poets, by BamBoy (Tushar Adhav) who grew up in Lalbaug, Parel. See full credits and installation images on the works page.
A performance by our collaborators on cctv.camp, Seoul Express. More details: https://njpart.ggcf.kr/when-the-cold-blows/. Part of CAMP After Media Promises, The Nam June Paik Center Prize Exhibition.
On three screens, a city-symphony filmed by automated CCTV cameras in Amsterdam. The optical and motor capacities of these cameras are pushed to an extreme. Certain human subjects reappear near or far in the images, suggesting a form of reciprocal knowledge or intent, a secret pact between cameras and people.
Join us for a season of new films at CAMP which explore configurations and revelations of "world", amidst a world in pieces.
We begin with the one of the best films we have seen last year
GRAND TOUR
by Miguel Gomes
2024, 120 mins.
7:00 pm.
in memorium, Tejas Pande.
Five narratives developed in the class "Footage Films", that re-assemble archives of campus protest, Penn Museum collections, university weapons development projects, the Schuylkill river, a utopia called Shangri-La, and their intersections across time and place.
*Recalling Far From Vietnam, collectively-made essay film from 1967.
Screening and conversation in collaboration with University of Pennsylvania’s Cinema & Media Studies department and CARG. At old Slought/ new Public Trust.
Film screening, and conversation 6-8:00 pm
We are proposing this term to think more broadly about extraction, waste, dependency, rear-guarding, mediatic conversions, in- and out-sourcing, and other aspects of chains of translation and steps of decision and production.