In Film and Television Institute of India in Itanagar, I was invited to conduct a workshop with documentary cinema students as part of their engagement with expanded documentary practices and new media convergence. We decided to begin by stepping outside the institute and into the State Archive, where another set of images and records awaited us.
Photographs and maps. Documents and administrative files. Fragments of a colonial empire and its ways of naming, describing and ordering people and places.
But an archive is also made of what it cannot hold. What is missing. What was left unrecorded. What falls outside its language.
The students worked with these fragments not simply as evidence of the past, but as material for asking what a record remembers and what it asks us to forget. Who appears in the archive, and who remains elsewhere.
Back in the workshop, these questions moved into images, objects and space. A photograph could become a surface. A document could be rearranged. A map could become a route. Narratives could begin with those the archive had failed to hold: an elephant, a missing Naga family, an ardent constable.
Tea. Coal. Rubber. These materials opened other routes through the archive, following the histories of extraction and the labour and landscapes folded into them.
Documentary moved beyond the screen, taking shape through material and installation. The archive was no longer only a place to look for history. It became a place from which to begin—with a fragment, a gap, an image, or something missing.
As Guest Faculty for Documentary: Theory and Practice in the OM Media and Journalism programme at Azim Premji University, I worked with students over six months to think through documentary as both a way of looking at the world and a way of making within it.
Research and observation. Representation and ethics. Sound and form.
These questions moved between the classroom and the field as students developed their own projects and short films. Documentary became a space for testing different ways of seeing, listening, researching and constructing a relationship with the people, places and materials they encountered.
in Veddle,
Across the street from an artist-run gallery in Veddel, Hamburg, a group of refugee women were learning their first words in German. The language school formed part of the longer bureaucratic process required for becoming part of German society. This workshop brought these first lessons in language into conversation with the first lessons of audiovisual production.
Inside and outside. Close and far. Day and night.
Using the gallery's cameras and equipment, the women learned to look through a lens while learning to name the world around them. Interiors, exteriors, close-ups and wide shots became part of another vocabulary. The language of integration was something to be learned. Sound and image offered another way of registering the world. The workshop used cameras and recording equipment to make video letters to friends and family elsewhere, shifting the terms of who speaks, to whom, and in what language.
These letters did not simply describe a new life. They moved between languages, places and distances, carrying impressions of being away while questioning what it means to arrive, to belong, or to become legible within the language of a new country.