Routes of desire
by Tushar Madhav
Research & project
‘Routes of Desire’ is an expanded-cinema project that adopts cruising as an artistic research methodology to reimagine an urban forest as a site of lived queer histories. Exploring the trees of the Oeverlanden forest-reserve in Amsterdam as living archives of queer existence, it reinvents them as portals of inquiry, of speaking, listening and creating fantasies. While the trees evoke through their own parable potentials of discovery and speculation, the project wanders through a labyrinth of archives and lived histories both encountered and stoked by the forest.
What do the trees desire? What do they speak of and make me speak about? What remains unspoken between us and needs to be spoken about? In the realm of our desires, what do trees and I have in common? If I were a tree, where would my roots take me and what would they reveal of my lived history?
Through its methodologies, the project proposes to expand upon the activity of cruising inside a forest as an exercise to observe, meditate, converse and speculate. Weaving the intrepid complexities of queer desire and an urban forest’s wilderness, it combines analog photography, documentary, archival research and performance practices to reflect upon the traces existing between the intimate and the public, the historical and the poetic, the anthropological and the auto-ethnographic.
In a constellation of creative outcomes, the project composes an expanded cinematic formulation through a film titled ‘Rangi: Sanctuary of Whispering Trees’, a photo book titled ‘In Trees, I See’, and an exhibition/performance titled ‘Tales from a Gedoog Forest”.
Visual Abstract Artistic Research:
Tushar Madhav
Tushar Madhav (b1985, India) is a filmmaker and moving image artist working at the convergence of creative documentary film, photography, archival research, performance-making and installations, seeking and voicing lived histories through his artistic research practice. His work investigates the politics of artmaking, weaving the intimate with the collective, reflecting on the constructions of dominant gaze regimes within socio-cultural spaces. He is interested in exploring the interactions of human and non-human, transient and temporal, employing cinematic impulses as creative rituals.
He studied M.A. Mass Communication at AJK MCRC Jamia Millia Islamia University and earned a Bachelor's degree in Economics from Delhi University. In 2017, he was awarded with the 64th National Film Award of India for his debut feature documentary film ‘A Ballad of Maladies’, which explores the Kashmir conflict through the lens of its contemporary artists and poets. The film won several other awards and screenings around the world at film festivals, museums and galleries.
Tushar has received grants and fellowships for his independent research and film projects from India Foundation for the Arts, Catapult Film Fund, Field of Vision and the DMZ Docs Fund. Winner of the AHK Talent Grant, Holland Scholarship and the Gonda PhD grant award in the Netherlands, Tushar is presently pursuing practice-based PhD Arts with Leiden University and KABK in the Hague. Through his PhD studies, he is developing a film project exploring the art and suicide of Indian painter Jangarh Singh Shyam.