Yashaswini

This work began in Daspara, a village in West Bengal where discarded 35mm film once found a second life in handmade toys. Drawn from conversations with toy-makers, collectors and families, the project follows cinema after the cinema has ended—when strips of film leave the projector and enter the informal economies of recycling, passing through the hands of small-scale workers who cut, stitch, colour and remake them into objects of play. The work lingers on the labour that allows materials to survive beyond their intended use, asking what remains of an image after it has been seen, and how histories continue to be carried by the hands that transform them.

• That Cloud Never Left — feature film
• Kyatketi and Other Videos — for People's Archive of Rural India (PARI)
• Sun, Moon, Toy, Earth — installation
• Daspara Toy Tales (in development) — workshops and short animations with a government school