Using oral storytelling and sound, a narrative sets the contradictions in the interrelations of ‘nature’ and ‘technology. The narrative reframes the differences worlded through mapping, being mapped and how we live with ambivalence. Conceived as a gameworld-reading, the disappearance of a tigress from mapping devices is a political embodiment of seeking refuge and resistance from capture. It takes a critical look at how scientific institutions tend to imagine non-human beings as passive and static. Here, the ultrasonic –the high frequency audio spectrum beyond the human hearing range–, marks a starting point for radical queer relationships of future ecology. The missing tigress Kali and her subsequent search, is based on wildlife researcher's fieldwork, told to Gayatri Kodikal by Navya Ramesh, who researches human - big cat contact zones at the National Institute of Biological Sciences, in India.

The script was first developed in Berlin at the Silent Green Kulturquartier as part of the Dutch Art Institute’s annual Kitchen presentations. It was adapted for Matadero Madrid, "Queering the City: A Sono-orientation" curated by Katayoun Arian which is part of the exhibition "Twelve Cautionary Urban Tales" (2020).

PHOTO: Traces of hair found where Kali was last 'seen.'

GAYATRI KODIKAL has an anti-disciplinary practice creating game worlds - both analogue and digital, experimental film, installations and performance. Engaging with the personal and political, her research explores haunting, encounter and disappearance as a speculative strategy for the modulating body in response to social and technological power structures. Psycho-geography, cinema, game design and oral storytelling informs her research and inquiry that has led the work often combining specific historical instances with her interests in ghost stories, animism and spatial memories. The investigative quality of such instances, missing information and wrong trails inspire fictional reconstructions and speculative situations that appear in most of the works. She traces the material and immaterial as assemblage, where she tries to maintain the illusive physicality of the digital and instability of the analogue.

PART OF THE EXHIBITION

08.07.2023—27.08.2023
The Ground Up And The Washed Down