Ayisha Abraham allowed a fascination with disparate materials to evolve into an art project.  

 

"Subterranea" is the culmination of a research with the scope of collecting 8mm film footage that would be banished to a dustbin and fragments of beta and VHS video and seeing if a video installation would give them a space to co-exist.

The project consists of three parts.

 

The first, “Ram Gopal Archive” began with a fragment of 8mm colour film recorded by the amateur filmmaker Tom D’Aguiar who lived in Cooke Town, Bangalore, and died in 2000 at the age of 93. This 8mm colour film that was nearly lost as junk, then saved by Abraham and now forms the basis of this installation. 
             

The second, “Through a Dark Mine”, is a move from the light space required to film Ram Gopal and takes the spectator through the feeling of descending 7000 feet in the search for gold. 
 

The last part, “In Her House” tells the story of Abraham’s grandmother Thangam, whose name means gold in Tamil, and similarly to what happens in “Through a Dark Mine” her story is told from the interior of her home, starting from a small box found in her cupboard after she died. 
 


The idea behind each of these installations is not to burden to allow the spectator to encounter it in his own way, without questioning the intentions of the author. “Chris Marker (a French writer, photographer, film director, multimedia artist and documentary marker) is the one who taught me to pick up random images and begin to see structures and find the unintended links between them all,” said Abraham.