ABHAY KUMAR

GRIDS AS CONTROL MECHANISMS

EXAMINING DEVIATIONS WITHIN THE GRID

Abhay Kumar is a double National Award-winning filmmaker from India. Abhay’s work often appears in response to power structures and systems which control access. His hybrid feature documentary Placebo (IDFA, Hotdocs) got a worldwide release on Netflix in 2016 and won the National Award for Best Investigative film 2017.

Working with verité non-fiction, animation, found footage and fiction, Abhay's work tries to find a hybrid space in storytelling. Abhay's 2011 hybrid animation short just that sort of a day became the first Indian animation film to compete at the Tribeca Film Festival and won top awards at Busan, Regensburg and New York, and got him his first National Award for narration in short fiction in 2012. Abhay edited and produced About Love which won awards at Sheffield, DMZ Docs, Hainan and went on to secure distribution through POV, North America and a global release on Mubi in 2021. Abhay is also an alumni of the Berlinale Talents 2016 and attended Berlinale Talents 2021 under his artist name ‘Fugue’.

storyteller.ink@gmail.com

I was born inside a Grid. And then I forgot about it. You move left, you move right, you move straight - you move thinking you have free will. And you do, but only within the pathways allowed by The Grid. Straight lines - never curves. From inside The Grid, it’s impossible to know you are, inside the Grid. You internalise the Grid - from physical to conceptual, invisible. To truly notice The Grid, one needs a different vantage point - a slight elevation, a top down view, you need to get high-er. A Grid is an Apollonian concept - geared to orient, systemise, pragmatic, ordered, measured, controlled. However, no Grid is a perfect system, as subtle deviations ripple through its straight pathways. My research aims to create an exploration of Dionysian deviations - queer desires, off the grid desires, monsters, primordial impulses which constantly challenge the Grid.

Thus duality forms the bed on which this research builds - through a theme of ‘transformation’ which connects the dual streams of inquiry. A Natural landscape is ‘transformed’ as a grid is imposed upon it. A space transforms into a place as humans interact with it, guided by architecture and design, a thing becomes another thing - an altered state. A human wants to escape the Grid and ends up in a club - a Dionysian ritual gathering. Space-Body-Sound-Light collide to create a trance-formative state within the architecture of pleasure. The Grid can only work if those occupying it submit to its plan. But what about those who exist outside the plan? Those who exist against the Grid? Exploring ‘horror’ from a spatial perspective, the idea of ‘monsters’ emerges as ‘beings that escape the taxonomy of the Grid’.

Using cinema as a medium, this ongoing research expresses itself through two projects:

A) Sector Quicksand: hybrid feature documentary in development

Chandigarh stands as an anomaly amongst the chaotic Indian landscape. Designed by Le Corbusier in 1964 as a utopian vision of what modern independent India could be, his obsession with straight lines and ‘form follows function’ is evident in the grid urban design of the city.

Chandigarh 3d model

Le Corbusier

Chandigarh plan 1951

The city is divided into 60 grids. Each of these grids is a mini city called a Sector. The social housing in sectors are divided into 13 Types. Type 1 for the highest government official and type 13 for a peon. I was born in sector 7 in a type 10 house. When my father retired from the government service, we were in a Type 8 house.

A filmmaker visits his parents in his hometown of Chandigarh trying to resolve an ongoing disagreement over his life choices. Over this time spent at home, where moments of gentle affection seem to be punctuated by a total communication breakdown, the filmmaker starts to suspect that the city might have a more insidious role to play in this unravelling situation. As he spends time within the grid of the house, the larger grid structures around him start becoming apparent. Could it be possible that the design of this city suppresses individuality, which threatens its ideal of order and coherence? GD** says “If you are caught in the dream of the other, you are fucked”. The film examines how the physical grid of the city projects a conceptual grid over its inhabitants. The film plays out in a dystopian setting where the will of an individual is set against the collective will of the city itself - the city as a breathing organism, made of clean lines, geometric angles demanding submission to its will, and the individual trying to come to terms with the cost of going against it.

B) The Room: science fiction/dance short film in production

‘The Room’ is a desire machine where ‘off grid impulses’ manifest. In a nondescript basement, a group of people are being interrogated about their background by an off-camera voice. The interrogation starts friendly enough, but soon acquires a threatening tone as the detainees are questioned about The Room. “Why did you go to The Room?”, is the oft repeated question that is drilled into their heads as the detainees start to unravel slowly. The film constructs its narrative through the tension created between the interrogation and visuals from The Room - a dark strobe lit bunker where people dance manically to pounding techno. What is the secret of The Room? What desire is it fulfilling?

By revealing these answers, The Room aims to pose the question: ‘Who gets access to hedonism, and in what conditions?’

* SS- Susan Sontag ** GD - Gilles Deleuze