The Falling of the Ripened Fruit: Who Collects the Labour of Time?

The Falling of the Ripened Fruit: Who Collects the Labour of Time? 

Time ripens the fruit, which then falls to the ground and becomes food and fuel. Held too long, the fruit rots into time. All forces succumb to time, as if time, an immemorial monstrous force, builds nests in every entity that ever held life at its pith. But does time itself age? Does it lose its agility, falling prey to its own order? As the river meets the sea at the estuary, when does time meet an epoch? And, in the face of cultural and political changes shaping the present world, what do epochs reveal about a fragmented time that has made itself visible through mines and homes turned museums?    

Drawing on these questions, Qamoos Bukhari presented four video works by Raqs Media Collective in continuation of Time Is Never Ripe, their recently concluded show at Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation, which was curated by him and supported by RMZ Foundation. Across the series of artists' video works and films: Provisions for Everybody (2018), The Blood of Stars (2017), A Planet Turns on its Axis Without Permission (2018) and Deep Breath (2019), Raqs followed the quiet life of matter: coal, salt, iron, water, air. The session was convened with Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi and Qamoos Bukhari as panellists and Meera Menezes as moderator. 

What does it mean to measure time not by numerical, institutional conventions of hours, weeks and months, but by the sun, moon and stars that once divided time into seasonal cycles? What does it mean to turn away from disciplined time and seek refuge in the “irregularity”, as coined by Giordano Nanni, that threatened the order imposed by imperialism? How were land, leisure and labour compartmentalised under that order? And how do landscapes, themselves by-products of labour and machinery, serve as evidentiary ground for reading this recusant time? Reading time against the grain means opposing the claim it stakes: linearity. Provisions for Everybody ends on an inverted shot of waves crashing into an upside-down horizon. If time is held in an hourglass, toppling it marks time’s passage, and in the undoing of that travel a new time zone emerges. 

Images 1–2: Time is Never Ripe. © Anant Foundation for the Arts.

Screening the travelling video work from Ladakh to a darkened room at Anant Art in Delhi was itself part of the conversation. The body’s experience, such as the breathlessness at a high altitude, opened up a way of perceiving the works through the somatic as well as the visual. The conversation moved to Ladakh’s material culture and landscape, including shifts in the pastoral community and its fragmented time, and rebutted the habit of reading Ladakh as a “remote” ecological remnant.  

It also raised what it means to move sideways in a landscape. A traditional plot pushes characters forward through cause and effect. Shifting “sideways in time” folds and compresses space instead, defies temporal and chronological hierarchy, and gallops across terrains. Provisions for Everybody moved through the places that shaped George Orwell: Motihari in Bihar, where he was born in the shadow of an opium godown; the road from Mandalay, where he began to understand how imperial force operates; the coalfields around Newcastle and Durham and Wigan Pier, where he investigated mining and poverty; and Barcelona, where he was caught in the violence of the Spanish Civil War. Together these places link empire and industry, treating colonial extraction and English labour as parts of one system, and folding distant epochs into one another. Against this backdrop, Orwell’s image of the world as a raft with “plenty of provisions for everybody” becomes a question about where that plentitude was ever delivered. To read Orwell against the Orwellian is to return from the dystopia to the road: from the figure of total control to the writer who trods through coalfields, colonies and ruined bridges, asking who gets the provisions.  

The audience took up the question of finding loops in time. The images were seen as a trembling landscape that returned against the grain. Raqs, in turn, reflected on writing an image and presenting it back to the historical public. The editorial choice of entering places through bodies in Augé’s transient, anonymous‘non-place’ sites, in a state of traversal, drew particular interest: Burma seen from an aeroplane or fishing boats.  

Images 3–6: Time is Never Ripe. © Anant Foundation for the Arts.

The idea of provision was explored through the miner’s house: the piano, the museumized fineries of the domestic space, the comfort of home and, a sound sleep as a provision. Jeebesh reflected on doubt and provision as mutual unsettlers.  During Covid, oxygen cylinders, the most urgent of provisions, came with doubt and negotiation: whether they would last, whether they were real, who would receive them. Provisions, then, arise from disruptions in equilibrium. They are not stocks held in safety but arrangements made under pressure and argued over. Mirroring the Buddha's Kalama Sutta as featured in the video work, uncertainty serves as a vital condition. If doubt is kept alive, there shall be provisions.  

The three other video works turned to other terrains: the salt stretch of the Rann of Kutch, the iron field, and the innards of the ocean. A Planet Turns on its Axis Without Permission stood out for its deafening silence against the dying light of day, reflecting on deep time, geological cycles, erosion and renewal, and how the Earth transforms and remembers its history. The Blood of Stars was an invitation to think about the relation between the presence of iron, a fugitive from the stars, sleeping deep inside the earth and the veins of warm-blooded mammals. Deep Breath featured the inscription of a phrase onto the sea floor, filmed with the help of three divers signposting an interval between the resting places of two shipwrecks: one ancient, the other not. The team also reflected on installing the works inside caves and caverns, improvising with how site, space and sound, and the affective tensions they produced, shaped the perception of the works.  

Labour as a time-bound force was revisited. Time determines its upheaval, its discard and its gradual rot, drawing it closer to the littoral, only to carry it further off, like the provision-bearing raft. In mid-ocean, living labour meets dead labour and ghost labour, as brought up during the discussion, and wades into an inverted horizon. Away from sight, an epoch rises to recognition.  

References: 

1. Nanni, G. (2012). The colonisation of time: Ritual, routine and resistance in the British Empire. Manchester University Press 

2. Augé, M. (1995). Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity (J. Howe, Trans.). Verso. (Original work published 1992)