Readings by Aulic Anamika and Zuneera Shah
Ānāpāna-Setu: The Breath of Divide by Aulic Anamika imagines a future South (2500 C.E.) dominated by a colossal Clean Air Corridor that deepens class and ecological divides. Sultana, a queer ecologist from the suffocating lower tiers, infiltrates the structure and meets Zara, an upper-tier engineer. Their encounter sparks forbidden intimacy and shared defiance, as their lungs begin adapting to each other’s air. Together, they reimagine the Ānāpāna-Setu not as a barrier but as a bridge, where the subcontinent breathes as one.
A mother is the first archive by Zuneera Shah stages a dialogue between mother and daughter across twenty-five years and two migrations. A daughter encounters a rare, unsent letter by her young mother as an immigrant. In light of the mother’s refusal to admit this past artifact into her present, the daughter’s response becomes an attempt to annotate her mother’s words through memory and fabulation, tracing how the myth of utopian futures is inherited, contested, and refigured across their separate immigrant trajectories.
Performance by houaïda and Promona Sengupta
Some subatomic particles are observed to spin 720 degrees to magnetize, their intrinsic function that holds everything in our material world together. houaïda and Promona take on the role of these minuscule components of our universe, hidden in plain sight yet omnipresent, to weave together a hidden history of the unknown and unseen pioneers of science, through music, sounds, texts, and laments.