Premise - There is no end to the story about the artists from America and India (x3), a 20 min film, is a collaboration between Patachitra artists (West Bengal) and Transiton Collective (UK) commissioned by Banglanatak Dot Com as part of their EU Funded Art For Livelihood initiative.
Traditionally the Patachitra artists, or 'Patua', paint long scrolls, depicting stories from the Hindu epics and from current affairs. The scrolls are ‘performed’ singing as the artists unfurl them. Based on this tradition of creating narratives, and triggered through a workshop with the London based artists in 2009, the Patua developed a screenplay which has been realised as a film together with the UK based artist collective in April 2010.
The project is more than just the film we made together. The process of collaboration becomes, in itself, a significant part of the work as a whole. In working with a group without a shared verbal language, what we really tried to understand was the language of symbols and signs - the information that came not only from what was said but also from the way it was said, the way people behaved, the way they lived, in order to find a way of communicating.
The screenplay is set in the villages in the district of Midnapur where the Patua live, but shot in the suburbs of East Kolkata in locations that resemble the villages. The resulting film draws from folk theatre, Bengali Cinema and Bollywood, sometimes resembling a musical soap opera. Folklore, social commentary, song and dance are woven together over twelve short scenes, encompassing the Patuas concerns about pollution and the environment, the economic challenges faced by the artists in their working lives, and a retrospective re-imagining of the preparations they made in anticipation of the collaboration between the two groups. Running through the film is the river, featuring in the landscape of the carefully chosen locations and appearing in one scene as the character Meghna, a personification of a river deity. Where the story-lines appear divergent from one another they can be considered as scenes that happen along the banks of a river. Often comic; out-of-sync dubbed audio, out-takes and constant interference from wind noise and passing lorries have been deliberately left in the final edit.
Transition is a London based artist collective comprised of Magda Fabianczyk, Niels Staats, Arunas Survila and Tilly Fowler. Their work, often taking the form of video installations, photography, performance and sculpture, is produced in response to events and encounters devised to bring distinct groups together for a shared experience and exchange. Initiating these events Transition provides an open-ended framework, enabling co-operative artistic practises.
