Browsing by Author "Iyer, Aishwarya"
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- An encounter by another name: O último dia de leão as a ‘beyond’ and ‘before’ experiencePublication . Iyer, AishwaryaThe experience of an encounter populates Tim Ingold’s 2011 book Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and Description. Although Ingold decisively critiques premediated colonial encounters of the human mind and proposes a grounded approach for postcolonial encounters, his insights fall short of addressing the experience within the technological condition. Through a posthuman critique, the articulation of the experience from being purely in the physiologically here and now has seen a marked shift towards the transversal capacity of it trespassing linear temporal-spaces but also political, ecological, and social intersections (Ingold 2011; Haraway 2016; Braidotti 2018). However, while work in the field of postcolonial and posthuman studies has aimed to highlight the very aggression that has manifested in the mechanisms of the Modernity/ Coloniality project – delineating the encounter as a strategy primarily as acts of violence, a theoretical transgression through Sara Ahmed allows me to elaborate the experience as mediations that demonstrate the partial perception of encounters. With a reading of O Último Dia de Leão (Leo’s Last Day), a performance by Nany Dayanne, set within the condition of linguistic incommunicability, I present the mediated gesture of the experience, one aided with Ahmed’s understanding of it as an ethical ‘before’ and ‘beyond’, and present a proposition for an encounter by another name.
- Responsibility of movement: a character analysis of Ahmad’s quest in Khane-ye Dust Kojast as acts of infinite responsibilityPublication . Iyer, AishwaryaThis presentation departed from my ongoing work which considers posthuman subjectivity to redeem the experience of encounters from the mechanisms of modernity/coloniality but also postmodernity/ postcoloniality. Staying with the experience of an encounter, in this paper I would like to examine the aesthetics of infinite responsibility (Derrida 1978, 312)– that which occurs upon encountering a strange(r) phenomenon – and what acts resist the construction of the Other. Situated within the field of curatorial practice and its questions concerning the philosophies and methodologies in times of theoretical exhaustion (Braidotti 2013), I undertake a reading of Abbas Kiarostami’s 1987 film Khane-ye dust kojast (Where is the Friends House?), to illustrate the practice of quests as a metaphorical tool during the experience of encounters. With the film acting as a microcosm in the broader field of hospitality, I study the gestures performed by Ahmad’s character as “a crusade against this ‘herd’ morality and […] an arrival at ‘ethical questions’” (Gabriel and Wilson 2020, 197). As visible in the movie, through the tumultuous journey of Ahmad – within harsh societal, political, and ecological conditions – as he attempts to return his friend’s book to save him from expulsion, Ahmad’s quest showcases the primacy of the body and movement (against a landscape) as an aesthetic reconfiguration of the idea of the host and guest. Thereby reconceiving hospitality as a “spatial and affective relational practice” (Zembylas 2020, 38). Through this, I hope to unpack how attention to Ahmad’s movement through the landscape displays a different kind of consideration by overriding the disciplinary politics of Iran in the last quarter of the 20th century.