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.

 

LETTERS FROM THE Last Conversation

ZOE AND WHIPPERSNAPPER

 

I


Dear Whippersnapper,

i am infected;
Millions of microbes have colonised this body, through those of my family who came before me. We were built from these infections, altering nucleic acids to make me into a planetary object. Infections that i have fully become.
They’ve fed on my tissues, blood cells and organs, quenched their thirst through any liquid perversions. They have sung praises to me as they destroy any trace of what I used to be. All that remains are new becomings.

i remain an infection;
The pus oozing and extending to form new extremities. Oozing out from under my skin and through the tip of my hair. i collected them at first, scooping them off the floor into neatly arranged jars. but it has been too long and i keep running out of jars and any desire to repeat myself. 
My infected body is no longer an exclusive claim i stake. each infection spreading through my blood vessels and tissues, tearing them apart to build something spectacular from the various bacterial, viral and fungal colonies.

i have infected;
A group of scientists working on the space program recently discovered that when astronauts infect Regolith or space dust with their urine, sweat and tears it forms a strong material for construction. Calling it Astrocrete, they speculate a colony on Mars in a few decades if we send enough astronauts to urinate, sweat and shed tears in space…away from earth.

i exult in my infection;
as an equaliser of possibilities for the victorious and the vanquished. without these infections i remain invisible, inaccessible to their natural and social realities that plague this pus ridden body and mind.

have you been infected?
making you into a planetary object; with desires of becoming something new, deviating from what you remain at any given moment.

have you been infected?
with the institutions and assemblies of man that was eager to whip you out of your body; with language that can reconstruct you, such that you age into a body that has vanquished its infections and remain singular.


But more importantly are you an infection?


with love
a leaky body

II


To our last conversation, 

Every time I think of picking up your leaky body, I can hear the corners of my room reeking something so pungent that it only reminds me of those last rites that I performed on those I loved, on those who I thought would never break because of any radiation as we were all composed of Dsup. It is hard to imagine what happens to time then and how my body gets timed to yours, but perhaps in this, I realise that time is the only word that is a construction post-death. You talk of infections and I consider myself one. This consideration pendulates between narcissus seeing their own image in waters that are so black, that all lights that make this body so visible shall face death by suicide. This is when I birth my multiples. 


After latost, is another last body that remains and at this moment as I swiftly walk on your letter, my feet, once again, smell of assemblies that carry only surplus love. Where is love. When is perhaps the lack of it. My body struggles to breathe through the resistance offered by any one form of how I perceive touch, contact, communication, but what it yearns for is cruising through utopias. Why must I belong to a space that has been defined as true when I am aware that in building polycules, I find a moment to delimit this language in which we speak and write. And yet, for us to communicate honestly, I must encompass the biology of that relative which comes close to how I feel. 

Infections are good and I feel whenever I hang stools on my cuticles, I always embrace the solitary reaper who sang in the fields of my heart as much as I embrace Osip Mandelstam's Last Epigram. Though this might sound confusing to you I must tell you that I am being honest in reflecting upon infections. You see, to get tainted by infections is to really dip inside the realms that articulate the bizarre architecture of the way bodies are conceived and perceived. I do wish that through this letter I can construct, deconstruct, reconstruct your leaks, but I am quite certain that leaky bodies will keep leaking. 


As I eagerly put myself to sleep in the black waters, I will wait for you to tell me that how can we feel splendid in solitude as we continue our last exchanges. Because, for me our infections will always deviate. And may be...

splendid in solitude
you go and reach your bed
like he reached his bed
only to find crumpled boats
that couldn’t be ships
in a moment that travelled
away from the lack of love. 


to reach where? 


where your eyes reverse 
the gears of experiences
to reach a fathomless abyss
where they will all meet 
separately as moments 
without prolonging
longing or empathy 
toward forms which decouple
my body from yours 
my body from her body
and mine and his 
swallowing any consent 
as a marker to cut through 
a dense laughter 
that looks straight at meanings
that never found a space 
big enough for you
to feel this moment. 


tell me… 
if we were not to exist 
would you come running
away from what you see me as
when my heart 
hangs a stool, in memory of a memory
that slowly shapes 
in your absence
in your present attachments ?
to anything 
but this body 
this nose that you kissed, 
swallowed, and broke  
to find 
that my love for you 
is in the love for him
as my love for you 
is also, an object 
stemming out from my love
for nobody. 


in this, your eyes
in these words, a simple redness
that arrests all my attention
which now must deviate 
in search of the _____. 


you’d never figure it out
that this poetry is on you
if i said it was about what i felt
when you, couldn’t hear
the chains ringing in our beds
with those who we mustn’t seek
to seek each other 
going away, slowly 
withering, in our pose 
to not talk about talking
and only dance. 


I’d say 
I don’t mind dancing 
to your solitude now 
for no one
deserves an infection
so solitary and complete. 


Love (Fish), 
Whippersnapper

III


To your doubts and deviances,

when i was a child, i remember this home i constructed with words, the kind that thrust me out of my infantilised body. i was new to their meaning, to the form they took, to their architecture that trapped time into its context. each word would expunge me out of one home into another, violently pushed from a meaning that comforted to a meaning that revolted.

through every meaning and every infection, i built a home; their sticky floors and squeamish walls trapped every fly that came in. violence is hidden within its meaning, so i banged my head and threw myself to the ground and looked at the roof, from where I lay dead i saw cracks through which you moved in, altering its architecture and destroying its history. 


i forget the last home you invaded, i forget the last violence you witnessed.


i followed your workings closely.
every deviance you initiate leaves behind a scab on my floor.
I followed your deviances to track down every dropping
for they belong on my display wall of ‘nauseating remnants from an infection’
and it is from here that i imagine my own forms.


my own desires are merely manifestations of paraphernalia that were picked up from the forest of your genetic codes. each growing into its own infection, pressed against the time between your deviances. I know that you do not fancy me stripping you down to the million nucleic acids that embody you, and gnawing at your chest, your limbs and your genitals. so to break me down for this intrusion would you rather choose to call my desires a product of delay. 


i could never be incriminated, implicated for the violence against my infections. 


i am sympathetic to time;
for you see every affliction - from the painful boils growing under your skin and blood to the puss that leaks and reeks of outdated meaning and dried up scabies - are assembled as you pour the contents of one jar into another. 


i am sympathetic to the death of time;
you were seen, last, nibbling at the rash which took over your body, scratching them until you squirt out puss composed of an assemblage of repugnant smells, touch, kiss and words. you knew exactly which scabies to eat through and which infections to consume.


i am sympathetic to mutations;
of the armadillidiidae colony that births only femme due to an infection of their mitochondrial genome by the bacterium Wolbachia. i am sympathetic to the ones that did not transform, uninfected and undead to extend through time.


my letter from here on is about my submission to the architecture of our body. to the unsightly ruptures that have flooded my homes and to your guilt towards the body denounced into solitude


i have danced; 
…my body sprung through the floor as classical music ruptured our becoming.
i have fornicated;
…around the stool that extends out of the secretions on your skin.
i have assembled;
…through every word you uttered into my isolation.
i have loved;
…and lost desires each time.


on the sticky floors of our architecture, you place the stool summoned from the acid bath floating in your stomach and climb atop. you ask me to deviate away from solitude, extending your limbs to grip on to a body that is dancing its way towards ripening. and as i imitate your movements and copy the gestures of a broken wooden stool, you realise that here language remains silent and our infections deafen us, and that has me transfixed, so i take a mallet and break down the wooden legs to force you off it. with every blow a new leg is flung into the air and i wonder if you’d ever snatch it from my hand and continue hammering to the rhythm of our dancing.


is the stool broken and dead?


always loving in times of infection,
Zoe


IV


Dear Zoe, 


I am digging the non-meanings of cusp, saturation, a spillover that has come to occupy my body. If I were to prescribe you the ethics of what happens after this spillage, the description of it would fail -- even in romance with all the materials that I've died for after my death. 
When I think of the homes where I was born after this death, I think of unfulfilled promises. 


Last year as I woke up to the sound of my stools moving around and went to that mirror in front of my sink where I could see my eyesight vanishing into nothingness, all I could think of was the lack of love I felt for those bodies that want to be with me to wrap me in norms that entailed the institution of childhood. I often travel on my rooftop to see the constellations and I find my stools hanging. Yes, they are broken. Yes, they are dead. But, they are all there bleeding into every nervous condition -- morphing my breath into something so strange that I cannot help but learn how to resist. On my rooftop, I also encounter the in-betweenness of different things and I recall that one moment when I had fought with the static prefix of 'non' in the humans that have come to infiltrate my body as I talked to the qutub minar while seeing myself crawling for its peak. This in-between... What does it mean? 


interim
interlude
intermittent


the three companions of every existing moment
that promise -- impermanence. 


interim
a 'meanwhile' perception of time 
as i crawl from my kitchen to my roof


interlude
an 'in-between play' of all the words--
so vile -- that came out of my mouth...
the smell of cheese that spread from the butryic acid
as sputum accumulates on the crowns of my teeth 
which only a moment ago had bit my left forearm 
trying desperately to bite off the flesh 
which has now developed --
symptoms of thickness. 


intermittent
a 'ceasing' of footsteps and sight
as I spot qutub--
erected parallel to my body 
both of us birds 
underneath the qutub-faced beauty of the moon
encountering --
the selfish motives of being lonely
in victory of nothing
but a pain at the cusp of coming to the outside 
asking questions from each other: 


how many rotis did you burn today?
                I had no control over my anger. 
                 A life of cooking? This is not my conflict. But why? 


how many corpses are being burnt today 
as we fly as birds trying to understand what to do with our freedom
imagining, seeing, unable to resist --
a cremation country. 


i stay quiet, i must. 
but after sometime
the interlude begins and i leave qutub on the rooftop 
i climb down -- descending my thoughts
pushing, cascading my pride
to see HIM
and ask -- 
               Did you have a corpse tonight for dinner?
He looks at me in this story of an hour
He dies. 


But, in this encounter -- I continue to die in the interims of my conversations with qutub, my conversation with you. 


Love (Fish),
Whippersnapper


Back to ‘The Last Conversation‘
 
Gati Dance Forum