How images, music and material keep memories alive

Nimi Ravindran’s exhibition-performance took the audience on a memory trip

What does a woman rolling a giant concrete slab over an open land have to do with a woman sitting at a table with multiple versions of herself — folding and refolding a napkin in different ways? Possibly, nothing. Do images from long held memories retain meaning and connection in the same way over time? How exactly do memories morph and fade? And what remains of a memory shared? These were some questions that came to mind while experiencing Nimi Ravindran’s exhibition-performance, ‘To Forget is to Remember is to Forget’.

Through film, art installations, recorded music and a non-formal performance (complete with disclaimers and a prompter), Nimi led the audience through the journey of making this layered work even while showcasing it. The description of a childhood without mirrors in the house led to a narration of how the only mirror in the house came to be. By this point, the audience had met her mother, who, by means of her stellar “playback singer voice” wins a tidy sum at a singing competition, and thus, buys a cupboard with a mirror. The mirror, however, was incidental and curtained off. What was not incidental was the metaphor of the mirror in the context of this work.

Nimi’s memories (and the experiences they reflected) became, at some point, a mirror for that of the others in the room. An audience member found echoes of her own mother-in-law’s experience of dealing with memory loss. Many shades of growing up in the 1980s and 90s — with ‘Chitrahaar’; in households run on public sector incomes, in families that wrote letters in profusion and judged people with zero fear of being called politically incorrect — were explored in the performance.

Of the art installations, the ‘Library of the Lost,’ with its neatly bottled memories and the photo booth, with its layered visual and aural inputs, emerged as favourites. The random ways in which we remember (and forget) were underscored by the art installations.

“None of it was planned the way it turned out,” says Nimi of the work she almost abandoned, more than once in the last decade. She had started writing it as a play but soon realised that she wanted “to simply tell the story of a daughter struggling to remember all the things her mother forgot.” The more she remembered, the more “facts blurred” and she became aware of a “dramatic reconstruction.” Her intent was to navigate the “the obscure landscapes of loss and memory through photographs, in objects, on film, and as songs and sounds,” she says.

Though her mother plays a central role in the work, Nimi sees it as peopled by many characters, and as much more than her mother’s story. For her it is, “an exploration about what we remember and why and what we forget and how.” Having been a producer of theatre and performance work through Sandbox Collective that she co-founded, some creative aspects of this project felt known while others, like the new media parts, she found challenging. Having collaborators whose skill informed different facets of the work, helped immensely, she says.

Sujay Saple designed the overall project, also playing the role of a dramaturg. Sachin Gurjale and Baan G worked on sound design; cinematography and editing were done by Ben Brix (with additional editing by Samrat Damayanti) for films conceptualised by Nimi; Rency Phillip and Nimi designed the photo booth with Aakriti Chandervanshi providing image design support for the same. Charulatha Dasappa managed the production (assisted by Surabhi Vasisht) while also contributing songs to the ‘Akashavaani’ exhibit with Bindhumalini Narayanaswamy, Pallavi M D, Mansi Multani, Deepthi Bhaskar and Nimi. Woven by multiple creative voices, ‘To Forget is to Remember is to Forget’ contained many memorable images and moving moments.