NITHYA IYER

Sītā means furrow, is a text and video work reflecting on the performative intervention of digging a grave and burying one’s self as an act of deterritorialisation. Burial sites are among the earliest demarcations of borders and a fundamental basis of territorialisation. Engaging the body into this marking and conjoining to a the frontier of the spirit world, the work invites a reconsideration of how the stories of ancestors and figures of history are told through the limited ideologies of their time.

Using the theories of kinopolitics – or the politics of movement – the story of Sītā from the Hindu epic, the Ramayana is reframed in terms of territorial intervention. This telling is entangled with the names and anecdotes of the artist’s own foremothers as a means to imagine an alternate passage for the invisibilised women of the South Indian diaspora. The body of the artist shifts and moves within the grave as the stories unfold, gesturing to the restless nature of diasporic inheritance.

‘Sita means furrow’ was created on site at AADK Portugal under the auspice of Vania Rovisco.