Nostalgia for the Future (Avijit Mukul Kishore, Rohan Shivkumar, 2016)
I am deeply cynical of the modernist movement. Underneath all the pomp and fair I see a blatant desire for control, to turn the people of the land into legible subjects of the state, easy to govern (read surveil). But this documentary as video essay proposes a counter. No, the modernist project isn’t redeemed as much as it is presented as the last time we evinced a capacity to imagine a radically different future unencumbered by the baggage of tradition. Sure this feels naive and shivkumar and kishor understand how foolish it might have been to think we could simply dream our way into a future without actively building into this dream reparation and resilience. But this is now a world bereft of political imagination, where decolonisation is conflated with atavism, where citizens are tribes kindling nothing but bloodlust. Oh to be reminded of the halcyon days of modernism, where a dream was possible.