Murari Jha’s performative video THE LONGEST MARCH: STRETCHED BODIES “offers a unique psychological view touching on certain traumatic experiences that stretch the body far beyond its limits of bearability, sanity, and cohesion, to the point where pain becomes unindividuated and the body gets transfigured into a universal affect, similar to a landscape.”*
Presented by abr, “an alliance of cultural practitioners—Anne Couillaud, Adwait Singh, Priyanshi Saxena, and Shaunak Mahbubani—coming together over shared vulnerabilities, to create a circle of care, communality, and conviviality in these uncertain and difficult times,” THE LONGEST MARCH is streaming now.
MURARI JHA—THE LONGEST MARCH: STRETCHED BODIES*
abr manifesto:
To make use of the rupture and increased connectivity afforded by this universal moment of crisis for encouraging new convergences and incipient growths that are governed by the ideals of sustainability and equity. To corral our individual isolation into a moment of collective reflection on our present condition as well as our imminent futures, possibly establishing precedents for what sustainable, equitable, and meaningful collaborations can be like in a post-Covid world.
To facilitate the circulation of resources within the arts ecology, by commissioning meaningful digital art, videos, performances, and other performative works from artists for our social media pages by mobilizing small sums of money as honorariums. To set up mechanisms so that young artists in need can be reached via members and partners, or can reach out to us via open calls for inclusion in our networks of support and collaboration.
To mobilize our privileges through the pooling of time, energy, funds, and networks, as much as possible, in an attempt to move towards a more level playing field. We extoll the principles of self-help, DIY cultures, gift-economies, creative commoning and time-pooling to go hand-in-hand with an embrace of the rudimentary/ improvisational aesthetic to foreground practices that are situated and marginal to mainstream commercial circuits.
To actively strive for an affirmative diversity of gender, caste, class, religion, race, location, language, ability, and sexual orientation in our inclusion of participants and partners.
To harness the potentials of the digital to foster real-time connections and meaningful discourse as much as possible. To temper its competitiveness, toxicity, celerity, and solipsism with attentiveness, tenderness, sensitivity and care, and to imbue our newly embraced digital spaces with the communal, serendipitous and ludic aspects of the art world that we love and miss.
To strongly favor community over viewership, content over numbers.
To actively question the chrononormative regimes and capital-based models of productivity that regiment our bodies, while moving forward in ways that allow for slow sustained cultivation and support for each other’s needs to rewire and reset.
To initiate a gesture of empowerment and attempt to understand what makes art resilient to the vicissitudes of time. To witness and manifest its strength, its aliveness, its resourcefulness as well as its capacity for regeneration in adversity.
To participate in, and proactively strengthen the nexus of solidarity amongst independent, para-institutional concerns in the arts by formulating opportunities for sensitive collaborations.
Murari Jha, The Longest March: Stretched Bodies, 2020, video stills (4). Images courtesy and © the artist.
