CONCEPT NOTE

Perhaps, there are constantly shifting ‘interiors’ revolving around our collapsing ‘peripheries’. At the face of it ‘the core’, ‘the central’, or ‘the nucleus’ seems spreading its tentacles to appropriate the unmarked. At the face of it ‘ the fringe’, ‘the outskirt’ dream to metamorphose into the privileged, the marked. And since there are deep cross currents occurring underneath; it often becomes difficult to locate ‘the body’,’ the being’ in the present of us. The universal of this ‘us’ on our earth is already like a Karavan, inwardly moving from one end of the globe to another, and from one individual to another at micro level. Art is another exercise to realize this very Karavan, in reality, and in thought simultaneously.


So, if these two: ‘the Periphery’ and ‘the Core’, are adequately defining our respective presents , then almost involuntarily, most of us would see themselves located within the vicissitudes of peripherals, and not in the imagined cores.

So, the genesis of ‘this Periphery’ and ‘this Centre’ of ‘us’ is, perhaps, pregnant with a deep past inside its womb: a core which delivers ‘a periphery’ in continuum. This continuum as alloy of Art, Culture and Life can be experienced if we move through the corridors of ‘the other’. The possibilities to experience that are manifolds at the ‘outer edges’ than within the condensed ‘cores’. And if we yearn to “disseminate the sensible”, perhaps, we need to move from one edge to another, physically and even in thought.

At the Periphery, there are some earthy scents, some casually drawn boarder lines, some innocence which keeps on lingering between the lush foliage and the roofs made of baked tiles, or pieces of wood, or few bamboo sticks, or simply some soil and grass. The seemingly ‘concrete’ at the peripheries is tangible but passionate enough to keep itself oscillating between the old and the new. So, numerous peripherals are brimming with drives which manifest the order-disorder of our Karavan, inwardly.

The ever morphing of Periphery brings into its fold a fresh lot of unmarked, who are hastily churning their stocks of sensibilities with those which are easy to grasp. Their intervention only reinvigorates the nerve which programmes a fecund continuum.


Aesthetic praxis at PERIPHERY involves ethnic and gender bending, cultural intermarriages and constants, atypical and surprising power invasions. May be then, it is safer to say that the stagnant core is even worse than death. In short, we need a Karavan, of different ideas and of strangers moving on wheels of our time, camping and moving on, camping and moving one


In our world, cultural borders have moved to centre stage while the alleged mainstream is pushed to the margins, treated as exotic and unfamiliar, placing the audience member/viewer in the position of a "foreigner" or a "minority". It sounds "heavy" but it is actually a lot of fun.

I quote Marcel Duchamp “Art is a game played by all the periods of all the times” In opposition to a Centre, various types of games , both ordinary and intensely profound, are already in vogue at the Periphery. The inclusiveness of The Karavan of cultural activists and artists are likely to pump the excluded vital back into the veins of ‘the centre’, But that can happens if we move through the Ourskirts as Karavan. We can always return to our core, but with a new outlook, with a new politics.

Peripherals are conglomerations of layered discursive spaces, which are potent enough to transform identities of the subjects which happen to be of any kind of inhabitants of our age old cultural practices. Peripherals is the name of a grease applied to the wheels of our thought to mobilises our obfuscated realities.


Peripherals are about the legacy of the fear of the other. Ad nauseam within peripherals is the gaze of the  hub, the core, the interior, the walled, the nucleus, the privileged, the central. But the spongy nature of the peripherals tends to absorb all, all that we call all. And what it reflects back coherently, aesthetically and ritually, is perhaps, what our respective existential selves are all about.

Layered profoundly, the life at Peripherals is full of sounds, both heard and unheard, and therefore, capable of generating unpredictable overtures, here, different genres coalescing to produce what might help us to swim through the ravines of mind’s unpredictable.
Present day ruins were hubs of the past, and so the possible future ruins are perhaps, our very cherished and sought after cores. But margins, limits, boundaries, precincts, restrictions , confines, grounds, endings, sidelines, fringes, tassels, extremes, perimeter, outsides, outskirts, one times, outer reaches, suburbs, environs and villages might enable us to realize the essential of what we often dismiss as non-vital and illusory.