Indent: The Body & The Performative

Last-ing

An edition accrues over time. The etymological underpinnings of the term ‘edition’ gesture at acts of ‘giving’, ‘producing’, or ‘bringing forth’, doing so ‘out of’ or ‘from within’ bodies and repositories of people, ideas and images. Last-ing has been several years in the making, starting from murmurs in 2020, to a proposal in 2021, and finally, an edition with 12 works spanning writing, video, and photographs in 2022. What it has meant to us has changed constantly; imagined in a shaky post-pandemic moment, it now manifests as the intention to endure, to remain, to leave traces. To last, leakily.

Indent originated as a project of Gati Dance Forum, a dance organization in New Delhi. It was set up with the intention of exploring the relationship between the body and performance, with its mapping of this performative body expanding across space, time, and disciplinary boundaries with each edition. In 2022, Indent is imagined with collaborators working across time zones. Besides furthering an engagement with a performative and embodied imagination, it has also allowed us to consider what it means to edit and publish a ‘journal’. In making space for various textures of ‘writing’, from the diaristic to the academic to the visual, it can no longer rely on uniformity as harmonizing force, in using the same citation system, or models of ‘blind’ peer review. Journals are messy, leaky affairs, and Last-ing stays true to this confusion.

Moving away from a more conventional system of peer review that we implemented in previous editions, where external reviewers responded to contributors, this year, we set up peer review groups with contributors from the present edition, where they responded to each other’s work. This allowed long conversations to unfold between contributors, who then took some of that feedback into revised drafts of their work.

Instead of being released in a single drop of 10-12 works, this year, Indent releases 2-3 works per week, to allow readers to spend dedicated time with each of the works. This means that there is a shift in how the editors introduce the issue. Instead of doing a single introductory note, we write episodic texts each week.

How does a journal constitute itself? ‘Mapping’ how the 12 works speak to each other has been a large part of this year’s editing process. This included working with illustrator Alia Sinha to visualize a mind-map of the edition. The map takes many forms, appearing as a GIF and a series of still images that are further broken down into detailed segments as we release each work.

 

FIGURE OF DESIRE/WHIPPERSNAPPER

VIDUR SETHI

 

I am the whippersnapper, my garb—a mothership—is woven of macrophages by quiet investigative provocateurs. These agents making raw turns while ascending down any staircase catch vortexes of all behaviours deviant even to the most deviant norms. They occupy times inside the shining orbs which seek to care for all the existence of any nontaxonomy at the centre of ER=EPR. From earth, when I am there, the orbs appear like glowing worms mating in a night sky which is as dark as any desire that strives for a transparent flag. But the moment I realise that the designers of what would make my flesh are not distant to me but continuously activating cells of plural desires in my clothing, the separation between us is filled with much lesser gap.

I land in my mothership often at spaces of conflict where adults are so threatened by children that they invent an Institution of Childhood to kill Child Soldiers. Adult soldiers however, are allowed to exist and it seems so strange to me that I feel that even though many over here, on this earth, feel free, what they are actually trying to say is that they feel alone. After all, what do children make a case for other than letting those emotions and ambitions which are termed as degenerate live a longer life. With my long and plump body, a scrunched-up head that looks like a gas mask to many, I move slowly through the joints that hold these two walls which translates more children to grow up as adults in this world. A cosmos inside a microcosm where a language of communication--in which I write to you as you look at a black mirror lighting your senses, or a white paper which you can touch and feel—is many a times to live traditions which master in the act of getting lost in what entails the human.

So, all I desire for is a diagnosis of exclusion.

I do that by snapping my whips which might seem diminutive, insignificant, presumptuous at first but in its arrogance and irreverence towards all things ordered, it vandalises and searches for the before of an after, the after of a before. In this necromantic process of quietly entering inside the bodies of tables and books and speakers and trees and eyelids and veins and soil and airplanes and pencils and rockets and many such things, I love metamorphosing into tardigrades and step in slowly to desire for deviance and construct a chrestomathy of dissent, an architecture of care where I grow up as a child while I descend down some stairs.

In being the whippersnapper, I liberate; In being liberate, I feel alone; In being alone, I think of what to do with my liberation; In that and this, I deviate.

Would you like to deviate with me?

 
 
Gati Dance Forum