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Films by Rickshaw: The Tentative Collective

Categories: Feature, Video

Rising Voices note: This interview, conducted by Hira Nabi on January 7, 2013, was originally published on Mashallah News [1] and is republished in part with their permission. You can find more information and recent updates about the Tentative Collective team and projects on their website [2].

Mera Karachi Mobile Cinema is an initiative collaborating with various marginalised and migrant communities to produce short films made with cell phones, and to organise free screenings using a rickshaw-powered projector. The people behind it aim to provide an alternate space and build a collective artistic social practice.

Hira Nabi spoke with Yaminay Nasir Chaudhri from Tentative Collective [3](known as Aarzi Group in Urdu) who runs the Mera Karachi Mobile Cinema project. They talked about challenges involved in the project, social practice in the field of art and possibilities in Karachi.

karachi mobile cinema

HN: What is Tentative Collective?

YNC: We are a nomadic collective of people who share resources to create art in the public spaces of cities where we live. We want to cultivate new spaces for social engagement through creating surreal and transformative situations within the everyday. Our projects are collaborative, site specific and involve different levels of society.

At the moment, we are responding to the observation that public space is shrinking, and we try to insert ourselves into the city every time an opportunity presents itself. The name “Tentative” is appropriate for us because of the unstable political context within which we operate. We try to use the uncertainty to our advantage and adopt a sort of creative “Let’s do it!” methodology. Different people generously donate their time and resources to different projects depending on their interests.

Our latest project, Mera Karachi Mobile Cinema, was a response to the walls that are rising all around Karachi. Our parks are walled, and the beach now has an entry fee. Homes in both elite and marginalised areas have enhanced their boundaries using hedges, grilles, concrete and barbed wire — barriers to mark our visual landscape. For us, projecting moving images on these walls is a way of dematerialising them. Mera Karachi Mobile Cinema also aims to create a sense of community ownership of public spaces in various neighborhoods by hosting screening parties featuring videos filmed on cell phones and gathered from those locations.

HN: How does the project grow? How do you involve more people?

YNC: Each project has its own team of participants, so it really depends. I don’t think we are aiming to continuously growing. Personally, I think too much growth can have dangerous side effects. But we do want to become a sort of institution that is present for many years and available to anyone who wants to take advantage of our resources.

We are always open to new people and new projects. Since we are so young, I am currently handling a lot of the organising and structural setup. It would be great to get a good core group in place or a whole slew of people who want to take our themes and use them to organise new projects all over the city. Our current way of reaching out is through word of mouth, social media and a network of people we meet, work with, employ and  accidentally encounter!

With Mera Karachi Mobile Cinema we started small, with a lady living in Ibrahim Haidery [4]. She was introduced to us by an urban scholar, Dr. Nausheen Anwar, who is a friend and an adviser to our team. This contact became a member of the collective and pulled in her entire neighborhood. It was all very organic.

HN: How participatory is the work that you do? What kind of access to technology do collaborators have to create and share work?

YNC: I am trying to establish a horizontal approach to creating work. That is, I want people who participate to share and produce ideas equally and to learn from each other instead of having a top-down approach. This is very hard. It’s particularly hard to navigate class and educational barriers as some members’ privileges can outweigh the ideas of others. But we are aware of this and deal with it by exposing our own irregularities and subjectivities. Technology is shared as much as possible and we seek mediums that are easily accessible and common, such as cell phone cameras instead of expensive DSLRs [5] in Mera Karachi Mobile Cinema.

This offers the possibility of replication or reuse after we are gone. Therefore, in many ways it is the idea that has preference rather than the technology. And sometimes we dream of upping the ante and doing things like teaching our resident contact in Ibrahim Haidery how to edit and how to become a teacher for other kids in the neighborhood, so that after we leave the area that teacher can continue organising new things and develop our idea in myriad ways…

HN: What are some of the specific technological hurdles you have faced working in Karachi?

YNC: There’s a bijli (electricity) problem. Some of the places we go to have a kunda system [where people obtain electricity through illegal means by tapping power from wires without paying for the power consumption] and they don’t get electricity from the government. That made us think about how to make our projection system mobile, and was the main reason why it became mobile and self-sufficient. We have our own batteries and our own inverter, and we are totally off the grid. We were forced to think in those ways because of the specific situation in Karachi.

rickshaw

Since we don’t know what the security situation will be in the future, we’re trying to think of a vernacular aesthetic for this mobile cinema device, so that we are not overly conspicuous as outsiders. The situation requires certain decisions that inform both the visuals of the project and the subject matter.

Now, this is interesting as some of the videos that I received were, I realised, made just for me. Women had filmed themselves without burqahs, thinking that they were showing themselves to another woman.

HN: They knew the videos would be screened?

YNC: Yeah, they had been told earlier. When they realised they would be shown in public, there was an uproar. So we embarked on an intense round of edits, blurring faces and cutting shots of certain body parts. That edited body of work, with all the exclusions and the subtractions, became a piece of work in itself…

HN: Apart from that, have you been forced to self-censorship at other times?

YNC: Politics and religion are the two other things that we sometimes have to censor. In particular politics, because we can’t jeopardise the safety of the participant being filmed. Censorship is guided by the community so people tell us themselves. For instance, some women have said: “Look, I’m showing you footage of myself without a burqah, you can show it anywhere but just don’t show it in my neighbourhood.” Some people have made critical political videos and asked us to show them in a different part of town, where the opposing party supporters live.

HN: So, is Tentative Collective almost a kind of messenger service?

YNC: (laughs) Yeah at times but we don’t always do that, because we have to save ourselves also. It can also be dangerous for the collective, because if political videos go viral, “we” can be misunderstood as political middlemen and get shot at from the other side. We have to constantly reposition ourselves outside political rivalries in the city and stay clear of religious and political agendas.

To learn more about Tentative Collective, visit their website [2] or follow them on Facebook [6] and Twitter [7].

The same goes for Mashallah News [8]. They are a collective of multilingual journalists, bloggers, and graphic designers, a platform for what they call “disOriented” news, aiming to spreading a new outlook in French, English, and Arabic. Watch their blog [9], which showcases recent visuals and sounds, and follow them on Facebook [10] and Twitter [11].