Pallavi Paul, Shabdkosh, HD, Color, Hindi, Sound, 19 minutes 15 seconds, 2014

Shabdkosh occurs in the silences between poems – a contemplation of the need to be heard against the imperatives of forgetting. Many forms of ‘last records’ are conjured to create ‘deceased time’, a time that is not simply unalive, but has a force much beyond the world of the living. Chilean president Salvador Allende’s haunting last speech before his assassination hangs in the air mingling with Vidrohi’s obsession with being recorded, while images of hunters and the hunted slowly trickle in. All these together form the skin of the question that poet Jack Spicer asks of Lorca – ‘What did you want to do with a poem once it was over?’ Should ‘silence’ and ‘records’ always be placed antithetically, or can a new imagination of practice emerge from the world of the forgotten and the misplaced.