At the exhibition space, the Cocoon of Shifting Dreams becomes a gathering space for collective imagination where dream(lessness), utopia and dystopia are interwoven, challenged and revised. Around it hang the three banners of the Translation Terminal, a collaborative work by Spaceship Beben and the Queer Unschool South Asia 2024 cohort, representing a worldbuilding praxis across border regimes. This practice interrupts homogenizing labels such as ‘South Asia’, gesturing towards plural, fractured, and relational solidarities and comradeship. Histories of colonial fragmentation, fascism, and capitalist co-optation are brought into question and reconfiguration, under the translucent mesh of the disobedient dreamscapes: a site for time travel, memory, imagination, and collectivity to converge against all odds.
As revolutionary uprisings take place across South Asia, we dive into practices of time travel and comradeship as means of worldbuilding beyond the nation-state. As co-travelers on this revolutionary journey, you will be invited to embody a specific role though which you can share. We ask: which borders shape or haunt your dreamscapes, how does comradeship look like across fractures and obstacles, and what does your time travel kit need to stay connected and disobedient?
Based on our exchanges throughout the journey, we will create collective banners of protest and flags as carriers of memories. Painting and stitching on textile scraps, each time traveler crafts a small piece inscribed with dreams, nightmares and refusals, enlarging the disobedient dreamscapes. Rather than forming a singular emblem, our pieces will be knotted together into a flowing line – fragile, unfinished and ever-growing as solidarity and comradeship across border regimes. In this collaborative exercise we create techniques within the constraints of gravity and across continents. These entangled banners embody shared struggles, solidarities, and contradictions within and beyond South Asia. They will be hung in the exhibition space, enlarging the aerial dream-archives shifting through collective imagination, touch and time.