Raqs Media Collective’s The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone is now showing on MUBI in many countries as part of “Whitney Biennial 2024: Better Than the Real Thing.”
The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone (Raqs Media Collective, 2023).
Raqs Media Collective defines its work as a form of “kinetic contemplation.” Over the past 30 years, the group has practiced across media ecologies, investigating the material conditions in which media is created, circulated, and collectively consumed. Raqs officially formed in New Delhi in 1992, following the graduation of its constituent members—Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta—from the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia University. Unofficially, their origins date back to 1989, when they crossed paths in the early days of film school. It was “a year of breakdowns and breakthroughs,”1 including the launch of Web 1.0, the first iteration of the World Wide Web. This event configured a new relationship with image-making and consumption, which informed the group’s exploration of aggregated knowledge production. “The hierarchies, collisions, and anxieties of intelligences between humans, and between humans and machines, kept us in deep churning,” they reflected in 2023. “We anticipated that the world of politics, art, and cinema would undergo tremendous transformation under pressure from an enlarging, unstoppable, communicative infrastructure.”2
Just two years later, in 1991, the televised broadcast of the Gulf War occasioned a cultural moment of media eruption; at the same time, in India, the state shifted toward a more explicitly globalized, privatized economic model. “There was a euphoria of and in ‘big media’, and localised schema by which this media was to be accessed were getting redefined,” Raqs explains. “The word ‘media’ in our name carries this charge, retains our insistence on the import of this ecology on our world.”3 “Raqs”—or the “kinetic contemplation,” as they translate it—is a way of situating and finding oneself in relation.
Through multiform interventions, including videos, installations, books, lectures, and performances, Raqs explores themes of identity, the transglobal, and history. Our relation to that history, or to time itself, is often the basis of the group’s practice. Our knowledge of time, as the collective argues, tends to be anchored in an epistemological experience of humanity, one that privileges the human condition while disregarding other forms of life. But the history of human existence is rather limited in comparison to that of the nonhuman, who might have access to a deeper level of space-time than we can imagine. Raqs calls our attention to multiple forms of presence—what the semiotician Walter Mignolo termed an epistemic disobedience.4 “[O]ur account of time has become even more protean,” the collective has observed. “It is soaking in more configurations of material histories and ideas of life—from a meteorite older than earth, to the submerged paths of reindeers, to the intergenerational knowledge of living with animals, to the iron that courses through our bloodstream, to Neolithic remains, to pre-harvest fields, to bodily smells, to a desecrated stupa. A new surplus of life has to be considered.”5
The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone (Raqs Media Collective, 2023).
Raqs often takes up the question of transtemporal, trans-species time, including in their 2021–22 exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Hungry for Time. Both the exhibition and Raqs’s book of the same name, published this year by Spector Books, bring works from the Academy’s historical collection into copresence with contemporary works. Eleven “scenes” of such interpolation form the basis for the exhibition, which identifies thematic throughlines to engender new, decolonial ways of looking at the past, while imbuing art objects with a lived sense of the present. Their 2018 film Provisions for Everybody centers on writer George Orwell’s critique of the longevity of the British empire, reflected in his 1936 essay “Shooting an Elephant”6 and his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier. Drawing on Orwell’s speculative writing as a past-future counterpoint, Raqs wanders between Northern English, Burma, India, and Catalonia, observing, as Orwell did, the insidious nature of the colonial project across the twentieth century. Reflecting on their film, Raqs asked: “What if we could fold time in the same way as we can fold a piece of paper? Supposing we could fold it into a boat or an airplane, what kind of voyage would we find ourselves embarking on? Would we realize that our sense of our time, the time(s) we live in today, are also amenable to being folded in a way that can make us sense other times in a way that is suddenly up close and personal even as they retain their chronological distances?”7
One of their most recent works, The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone (2023)—included in the film program for the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Even Better Than the Real Thing—continues the collective’s ongoing examination into the transtemporal. The film was originally commissioned by London’s Jencks Foundation to coincide with the organization’s research theme ’isms and ’wasms: 1980 in parallax. Taking the year 1980 as its point of departure, ’isms and ’wasms focuses on the inception of the first Venice Architecture Biennale, The Presence of the Past, famous for its declaration that “Post-Modernism” had ushered in a new form of architectural practice. The titular bicyclist of Raqs’s film bears witness to several events throughout 1980, a year of “accidents, incidents, disasters, encounters, color television.” Raqs describes the film as a chronogram, commonly defined as a sentence, inscription, or phrase expressing a specific date or epoch. The collective expands that definition to include the feeling of a particular time.
Also referred to as a “light cone,” the time cone is a relativistic diagram of space-time, marking the path of a flash of light emanating from a singularity: a single point in space at a single moment in time. In a time cone, light spreads outward from a singularity to form two separate cones: the “past cone” converges on the singularity, while the “future cone” expands outward from the event, demonstrating its causality across space-time. If someone, say a bicyclist, found themselves in a time cone, they would travel in refractive dimensions, moving in all directions, away from and toward the singularity. They could not witness all of history, only those events leading to and emanating from a particular nexus in time—a closed loop, a bracket, the elliptical motion of the bicyclist’s chain.
The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone (Raqs Media Collective, 2023).
Returning to the source: The 1980 Architecture Biennale’s director, Paolo Portoghesi, characterizes the postmodern in terms of speed: the past and the present merging into one, or the desire for civilization to outpace the past through aggressive ideological and structural expansion.8 The Biennale took a speculative approach to abstract geometries, the relationships between distinct points, expounding their capacity to capture a forward-looking architectural aesthetic. Postmodern architecture was, in essence, a corporeal understanding of evolving spatial technologies—it manifested the felt experience of time in the physical environment.
The Biennale purported to represent an international stylistic sensibility, a move away from the homogenous, Eurocentric classicism that had defined modern architecture. But in reality, the exhibition, particularly its main section, “Strada Novissima,” revolved almost exclusively around the creative work and curatorial vision of white men; the so-called international architectural approach, and the way of moving through the world that it proposed, was still inarguably anchored in Western hegemonic ideologies.9 Meanwhile, the 1980s ushered in the fifth phase of the Cold War, a period of heightened hostility marked by the rejection of the decade-long détente between East and West, the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, the US/UK-backed Iraq-Iran War, the foreign policies of newly elected conservative leaders such as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan, the advent of the 24-hour news cycle with the launch of CNN, and the boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. In France, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari published A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,10 a book of rhizomatic philosophy focused on the ways spatial relations undergird identity in modern society. Each of these events, circumstances, and subjects bear both hyperlocal and hyperglobal origins, rooted in shifting hierarchies and alliances. They speak to the very fluidity of geopolitical configurations and dichotomies that Raqs actively seeks to deconstruct.
For their exhibition 1980 in Parallax (The Cosmic House, London, April 19–December 22, 2023), where The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone debuted, Raqs contended directly with the legacy of the 1980 Architecture Biennale. The word “parallax” refers to the phenomenon in which the position or movement of an object appears to shift when viewed from another angle, particularly through the lens of a camera. The term might recall the 1970 thriller novel Parallax View (or the 1974 film of the same name), in which the shadowy Parallax Corporation deals in the business of political assassinations.11 The parallax unveils ambiguity. It summons aberrant perspectives that stray from those taken as fact or understood as “truth,” demonstrating that multiple truths exist at once. Able to travel through time and space, the bicyclist in Raqs’s film embodies the dissonance of the parallax.
The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone (Raqs Media Collective, 2023).
The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone unfolds in a nonlinear, polyphonic narrative. The bicyclist—a tall, slender woman dressed in black, with a white collar peeking out—is interposed throughout vignettes of events scattered across 1980, narrated by the low, disembodied voice of a woman (Monica Narula). A closed bracket repeatedly flashes across the screen like a latent image; a high-pitched ringing fades in and out; white static recalls the physical materiality and obsolescence of video tape. A series of hand-illustrated characters, for whom the narrator provides voices, enter and exit the frame, overlaying collages of found and original footage of urban life. Some sites are locatable within New Delhi, while others slip between boundaries and borderlands.
The film situates the year 1980 in relation to a broader timescale: “Five years after the Emergency, two years from another set of Games, four years before the massacre. A dilated time when the avant-garde became transformed into a recalibration of ancestors.” These intervals refer, in turn, to the 21-month period of dictatorship in India under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi; the ninth Asian Games; and the pogrom killing 2,732 Sikhs after Gandhi’s assassination. “The decade began with a minute of silence,” the narrator tells us, alluding to the minutes of that year’s first session of Indian parliament in January.12 “There was a move to castrate bulls that year,” referring to the Gujarat Live-stock Improvement Act that passed in October. The bicyclist witnesses the July 18 take-off of the Rohini satellite (RS-1), the first successfully launched into space by India. On June 23, a pilot, “trying to outdo the currents of destiny,” crashed his plane; the bicyclist briefly observes the descent from nearby. The wreckage makes headlines.
The film often erodes the boundaries between the real, the impossible, and the surreal, showing the inextricability of the natural from the mythological. While the film alludes to these fluid distinctions and connections, a book that accompanies the film elaborates on them through extensive notes and citations. For instance, the following passage includes these annotations:13
The Bicyclist circles a dead tree on white ground. Shadows lengthen. A blood-red sign warns everyone to stay away from water. The first report in India of the presence of arsenic, a lethal toxin, in ground water, came from the state of West Bengal in 1980. Sometimes, said the oracle to the monkey, that is called a flood waiting to burst its banks.
Here, the bicyclist witnesses an omen of an environmental disaster to come. These events of seismic proportion break down into individual moments suspended in time. How these moments are witnessed and processed in real time differs from the historicization of the events; the perspective and knowledge that time affords equally engenders distance, an inability to situate an individual at a precise point in history. As seemingly ordinary, everyday images flicker across the screen in rapid succession, they evoke the familiar, fragmentary aesthetics of the spectacle, as defined by Guy Debord: “The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among people mediated by images.”14 Jeebesh Bagchi describes such a moment in the film: “In one of the ordinary videos, a Sikh family enters a bus followed by a red Ambassador car (an iconic image of the 80s). However, the family’s ability to cohere what is ordinary will be completely upturned by the events of the near-future, and the film hints at that moment when it says, ‘four years before the massacre’.” The film ultimately hangs on our perception of such shifts, between the subtle passage of ordinary moments and the abrupt confrontation of historical events.
The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone (Raqs Media Collective, 2023).
Trans-species perspectives of temporality appear throughout the film, as they often do in Raqs’s work. The protracted “moment of silence” is likened to “a chitter from flies, a contaminating witness to things not noticed.” The Bicyclist book cites Hungarian animator Ferenc Rofusz’s three-minute experimental film The Fly (A Légy) (1980), which depicts the brief life of a housefly from the perspective of the fly itself. In another story, the “oracle of time-cones” relates the tale of Ramchandra, a semi-mythical fish boy who, according to legend, was lost to the West Rapti (or Kuwana) River as a child, in a village in the Uttar Pradesh state in northern India; he was raised by crocodiles, only to reemerge on the shore in the late 1970s.
Each of the seemingly disparate stories in the film relates to a larger narrative within India’s history. While the castration of bulls under the Gujarat Live-stock Improvement Act was ostensibly undertaken to curb the population of cattle, it nearly led to the extinction of a native species (incidentally, a similar act was introduced in 2023). While the Rohini satellite program increased the nation’s teleconnectivity, the 2.5 million private telephones and 12,000 public phones were far outnumbered by the country’s population of 700 million people. As Raqs’s book points out: “Only three per cent of India’s 600,000 villages had telephones. It could take seven, sometimes, twelve years, before an application to have a telephone translated into actual possession of a telephone instrument and a viable connection,”15 and access remains relatively limited in the region to this day. The doomed pilot, Sanjay Gandhi, the despotic son of Indira Gandhi, was perceived to be the likely political heir to his mother’s dictatorship. The fish boy became a “momentary sensation” when he was reportedly killed in 1982 after approaching a village woman on the riverbank. This traversal between river and land lays parallel with the fish boy’s purported transgression of making contact with a species other than his own. But, as Raqs argues, what the villagers were angered by, or perhaps feared, was the fish boy’s ability to cross the border between worlds.
The parallax allows us to resituate our perspective in the historiographic, the mythic, and perhaps, returning to the Whitney Biennial, the “real.” Sparse narratives allow the viewer to enter the work slowly, to gradually recognize the broader implications of one’s locatedness in the present. Bagchi reflects:
The time-cone allows us a certain kind of consolidation and loss of perspective, not as an unanchored, unembedded floating device, but as a challenge to make sense of something that is extremely proximate and also in movement along with your movement. It is not only that you are moving and the world is static, which is a dead way of looking at the world, a dead reckoning. Or even that the world is continuously moving, massively, and you are merely trying to touch it. The time cone as a ‘thought process’ allows for a different ordering of this relationship.16
The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone (Raqs Media Collective, 2023).
The conception of time and the telling of history often feel binding, contingent on the collapsing transglobal experiences that complicate the convenience of linear time. The bicyclist’s anarchic anachronism deviates from such restrictive time, as she perceives a transtemporality only through the experience of uncharted, unprecedented space-time. Yet, she seems to do so not with authority, but with curiosity and a degree of happenstance. She does not take up an omniscient role, but rather drifts through interrupted fields, intersecting with individual moments in the past or present, not as an all-seeing spectator, but as an observer of disordered temporality, with and alongside time. The narrator describes 1980 as a bracket: an interstice, a fixed, yet uncertain passage of time. What might such disorder afford us? How can we understand history differently through this lens of nonlinear time?
A sense of deep time often eludes us. However seismic or small an event, of indeterminate or immediate origin, it reverberates throughout history, both concretely and abstractly. If trans-species imagining can open portholes toward understanding our deep relation to space-time, perhaps a shift in scale of the historiographic can manifest new forms of situating a nonlinear past in the dense infinitude of the present: not a “postmodern” but a “post-post” reckoning that contends with the multiplicity of narratives of history, identity, economy, and trans-species ecologies. With that understanding, globalization, the global spread of capitalist relations, becomes merely a fraction of a longer timescale of existence. Thinking through these temporalities proves a necessary exercise in confronting the myriad complexities of globality as it relates to the persistence of colonization, displacement, extraction, political conflict, and violence. Focused on processes rather than definitive answers, Raqs Media Collective probes the political, social, and economic conditions that influence how history is shaped and remembered. They seek to situate the presentness of the local to decenter the generational inheritance of globalization—of capitalist production, of scarcity, of state-dependence. The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone takes the year 1980 as a fixed point, a frame of reference to understand a moment in time suspended in silence. But, as the collective says, “There is a 1980 hidden in every year.”17
- Raqs Media Collective An Interview 2021–2023 (by) the Collective Eye (Frankfurt: The Collective Eye, 2023), 3. ↩
- Collective Eye, 4. ↩
- Collective Eye, 5. ↩
- See for instance Walter Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom,” Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 7–8 (December 2009) 159–181; and Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto,” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 2 (2011): 44–66. ↩
- Collective Eye, 21. ↩
- George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant,” first published in New Writing (Fall 1936); George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937).↩
- “Sideways in Time, Part 1: Raqs Media Collective talks with Erica Levin,” Read, Watch, Listen, Wexner Center for the Arts, April 5, 2021. ↩
- See Gabriella Borsano, ed., Architecture, 1980: The Presence of the Past (Venice: Edizioni La Biennale di Venezia/New York: Rizzoli, 1980). ↩
- See Lèa-Catherine Szacka, ed., Exhibiting the Postmodern. 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale (Venice: Marsilio Ediori, 2016). ↩
- Cited by Raqs in The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone (London: Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House, 2023), 1. ↩
- Here, the parallax represents a multiplicity of viewpoints existing simultaneously and, at times, in opposition. The story was inspired by the unrest and governmental distrust that followed the assassination of John F. Kennedy and, preceding the film’s release, the leak of the Pentagon Papers detailing the US’s escalated involvement in the Vietnam War, as well as Richard Nixon’s resignation following the Watergate Scandal. In each of these scandals, both anonymous and named eyewitness accounts were called into question. See also Art Simon, “In The Parallax View, Conspiracy Goes All the Way to the Top—and Beyond,” Slate, July 21, 2017. ↩
- Raqs’s Shuddhabrata Sengupta reflects on the moment of silence called in parliament: “In the film we refer to the beginning of 1980 with a minute of silence in the Indian Lok Sabha [parliament]. The decade begins with a minute of silence in homage to what has happened before. The ’70s were very turbulent. And I think that nobody anticipated how much more turbulent 1980 would be: it carries with it the ghosts of the haunting presence of the past and carries within it the not-yet present of the future.” In Eszter Steierhoffer, “Raqs Media Collective Interview: 1980 in Parallax,” Jencks Foundation (2023). ↩
- The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone, 13. ↩
- Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967; trans., Detroit: Black & Red, 1970), thesis 4. ↩
- The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone, 6. ↩
- Steierhoffer, “Raqs Media Collective Interview.” ↩
- Steierhoffer, “Raqs Media Collective Interview.” ↩