Between Dreaming and Dying (2015)
The intention in the photograph alludes to the protagonist lying in repose between the present, material space of Australia, his home, and simultaneously, the past, imagined space of India, his original home. He lies in the present space of Australia while imagining his past in India. His situation is simultaneously one of rest and anxiety, which sets the conditions of him imagining what the future may hold for him in terms of ‘home’. He is in the state of living and dying, between his adopted home and his ancestral home, not privileging one over the other, but rather accepting his state of being, where his imagination of home becomes borderless and multiple. The spatially ambiguous landscape in the photograph presents, here and elsewhere, simultaneously. As an Anglo Indian, he has negotiated his home(lessness) as being between places. As Lahiri-Dutt, in discussing home in relation to Anglo Indian identity, states:
This home is more a product of the imagination and a site of everyday lived experiences, a locality where feelings of rootedness ensue from mundane and daily practices. This home is a place with which one remains intimately connected even when physically alienated from it (2011, para. 3 [emphasis added]).
The Anglo Indian protagonist in the photograph now accepts his status as Indian, his place of birth (registered in his dress code),as well as his rootedness to his present locality. However, while the locality is Australia, there is nothing in the landscape that identifies the location as specifically Australian. It is a homogenous grassland (the grasses in this space not being indigenous to the place). While he imagines a place elsewhere, his ‘lived’ experiences are here. He is both under siege and at ease, in-between states of dreaming and dying. In the context of a transnational and globalised world, migrants who intentionally or unintentionally, leave their place of birth, negotiate every day, the fracture of lived experiences, of belonging as home and in exile simultaneously. Anglo Indian share this circumstance of fracture with the migrant. As both migrant and Anglo Indian, his experience of place is doubled.
This way, the protagonist in Between Dreaming and Dying (2015) is located in a simultaneity, of places and times. His presence articulates:
[...] the four positions corresponding to conditions in which people, in particular artists and thinkers, find themselves acting in the present. He is in the act of re-performing. He is under siege. He is in a state of hope and optimism dreaming in anticipation and is in retreat, sleeping (Christov-Bakargiev 2012, para. 5).
Images 1-7 were photographed during the making of Between Dreaming and Dying (2015)
Image 8 D’Costa, R 2015, Between Dreaming and Dying (Edition of 3), [inkjet photographic print on Hahnemühle FineArt Pearl paper 285 gsm; 97 cm x 66 cm (framed)].