In Praise of Shadows

In Praise of Shadows is a two-channel video installation that has been shot entirely at night over a period of 3 months across Panaji, Old Goa and Mapusa. The narrative, emerging out of nights spent roaming on the edges of a territory, examines the legacies of power, religion, violence, and resilience through the relics of ancient and modern history, probing the logic that encapsulates time.

Two large projections extend on two walls to build an immersive experience mixing sound samples and images. The alternation of irradiant screens and sudden darkness, stark sounds and heavy silence, breaks the narrative into fragments where the glimpse of a broken world of ruins (abandoned objects, skeletons of collapsed billboards, vacant spaces) coexists with recently built infrastructure like an omen of the latter’s fate. Raw footage, an unwoven succession of images, evoking a constant tension and traces of the imperceptible. A bath of blaze and darkness.

When the river sleeps, the reflection is brought from the surface of the water to the underground, where traces of human activity are engraved on the walls, on the pillars, in the dust. The foundations of the modern world seem to link the archaic to the present time, yielding an archaeology of the present.

Time is a loop, a circle with no beginning and no end.

Project by Julien Segard
Editing: Tanmay Kulkarni
Sound: Hemant Sreekumar, National Animal
Camera: Julien Segard, Siddharth Moulik
Drone Footage: Akash Madhukar Fulari
Assistant: Divyesh Undaviya
Special thanks to Kapil Das and Tenzing Dakpa

This project is part of The Island That Never Gets Flooded, a Public Art Grant awarded by Serendipity Arts Foundation to 6 Goa based artists who showcased their work at Serendipity Arts Festival, which took place in Panaji, Goa between 15–23 December 2022.