les fleurs.

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The flowers have arrived! Arvind was really kind to buy them in the Hanuman market for me. Yellow and orange marigold, red hibiscus, and white rajnigandha.
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The whole day today, I prepared my site. I started with marking the outer edges of the video screen on the floor, and then simply pulled each flower out of the garlands. It took me about 5 hours to do about 650 garlands.
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Sanjay, the security guard, came in the hall in the morning, admiring how nice the smell was. He was the first of many. Moe wanted to jump in. Pradeep followed. Moe suggested I should charge 5 dollars for each jump, and I challenged him. Some people wanted to sleep on it, including Moe again. Rajesh told me it looks like a wedding preparation – which I knew.
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Tomorrow Arvind is going to help me buy more rajnigandha and hibiscus. They would be fresher as well. I will have to see how the condition of today’s hibiscus is tomorrow. Perhaps I will have to get new hibiscus on the Open Day.
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Nous ne notons pas les fleurs – India is an installation with video and interactive performance. A bed of flowers is arranged to show a map of India, with its 28 states. A video on a TV monitor shows the process of shaping the bed of flowers of mixed colours into the bordered map. On the day of the performance, visitors are asked to move the flowers from one state to the other according to movements and migrations that they identify with. This performance is also recorded, and will form part of the final video.

Nous ne notons pas les fleurs is planned to be a series of work that talks about the ephemerality of geopolitical borders, looking into both people’s movement and the mutation of borders within a nation-state. The title is quoted from a dialogue in Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in which by way of discussing the ephemerality of the Little Prince’s flower, the supposedly lasting nature of geography is questioned.

This project is initiated at Soil Bite – Khoj Bihar International Workshop 2009.