[Un]Fictional Family[Frames]
Author’s Note:
[Un]Fictional Family[Frames]
- holds an attempt to read form, memory and embodiment in a gesture towards generating [Un]fictional affect through its figurations of ‘Family’ and/as imagined communities.
Consciously braided, the focus is on one’s maternal family nuclear-unit in the early 1970s, through their photograph remains of a roughly 6 years stay as Telugu diaspora in Kabwe, Zambia. These are braided and punctuated by various official documents that have lasted this 50-year, tumultuous acceleration to the present in July 2023, allowing for an anachronistic, syncopated, diasporic, time-travel. The lines are Sailaja P.’s fiction, gratuitously borrowed, which bring out a remixing, revitalizing, visceral narrative – at a chance futurity – suturing these photographs’ [in-frame] present.
These textures allow for a working with space, place, theoria and temporality – cleaving possibilities towards mobilizing ancestral frozen presences/absences, towards a more just organizing in aesthetic ancillary, provoking political intent. Herein lies a syncopated critique of gender, caste, class and nation-state – which while undergirded affectively, afford a capaciousness of [spirit] in its acknowledgement of all that brought one to the present, to have [you reading this].
Engaged with research primarily through theatre and performance, Supraja R looks to traverse boundaries and borders of interdisciplinarity. They seek to strategize scholarly and artistic practices in a bid to spark engagements and dialogue, beyond foreclosing disciplinary integrities. They are currently a PhD student in English at Ashoka University, Sonepat, India. They have worked in the theatre in varied consistencies and contexts, tussling with questions of embodiment and social positionality, within and beyond the boundaries of the studio floor. They have an Integrated M.Sc. in Health Psychology and a P.G. Diploma in Theatre Arts, both from the University of Hyderabad, India. They also have an M.A. in Arts and Aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.
Sailaja P. is a passionate and seasoned educator who works towards facilitating safe, inclusive and non-judgmental environments for a wide spectrum of adolescents to thrive and learn in. Her inter-disciplinary approach to learning engages students of all learning orientations. Sailaja has an MA in English Literature from the Central University of Hyderabad, a Bachelor’s degree in Education and an experience of more than twenty-five years in Education. Sailaja received a gold medal from IGNOU for Creative Writing in 2014. She writes, reads and travels whenever and wherever she can.
