I started the semester looking at cloud studies video by Forensic Architecture. Especially video related to tear gas which were mostly captured by the victims.
When I started working with these videos of the victims creating evidence, the phenomenon intrigued me. This evidence was created in a limit condition, namely: inside the fog of tear gas bombs. Many of which has the visual quality of accidental evidence; where the footage were captured by accident. Though the people inside the tear gas fog were not there as merely an accident but as a part of a forced accident; where one oppressive party created the situation for this accident to happen: firing tear gas bombs at them.
I wanted to re-create visuals with the qualities of accidental evidence in my footage but through forced accident. I chose our ‘kot’s kitchen rooftop as my experimental site. To achieve the quality of forced accident, I experimented with a two meter long stick to attach my phone camera to, which was inspired by the work of artist Michel François. This stick worked as my limit condition. Through trying to capture a footage with this limit condition, I have tried to make a forced accident, where regardless of my intensions to capture a video I have had a very little control over the footage. The stick being bigger than my body, the limitations created genuine accidents while filming.
From the forced accidental video footage, to experiment in a two dimensional illustration, I started collecting screenshots and merging certain one with another.
At this point I started looking at the screenshots myself, as if they were clouds of my childhood that could reveal an imagined space in between them. I asked some of my friends to join in this play and we revealed imagined maps, elevations and sections which I seemed to be accidentally unveiling by the continuous forced tracings.
These forced tracing revealed an hybrid space which in my imagination, is an outpost; created by the survivors of a series of artificial cloud attacks. The inhabitants of this society live in a constant state of fear and anxiety. Where they are always on the look out for unidentified clouds and conduct their own cloud studies. Their distorted worldview took shape from the generational trauma where the later generation had created their own mythos based on their surviving history. However, it is a blurred history containing only a few footage of accidental evidences.
