Everything all at once

“I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet (...)”

The above passage, from the Jorge Luis Borges short story ‘The Aleph’, describes the moment when the narrator (Borges) sees, for the first time, the titular Aleph: a point in space that contains all other locations, the superset of coordinates if you will. Therefore, a person who looks at the Aleph stares at the very precipice of the universe, everything ahead of him, everything all at once. The Aleph is a frame upon which the painted universe hangs. It is a memory that carries the seed of every memory you ever had or will have. It is a sign that subsumes the signifier and the signified (to say nothing of the ghost of Ferdinand Saussure).

“When I was rehearsing the opening monologue, I had to visualise these images to remember the lines. And every time, somebody would walk past me, or sneeze or talk loudly, and I’d think ‘this is going to happen during the play’,” Varoon P Anand told me, describing an elementary mnemonic technique. Anand is an accomplished theatre performer and Artistic Director at Kaivalya Plays. In 2011, he was awarded a C2 Spanish degree from Cervantes, scoring the highest in his batch. Earlier this year, the academic and library departments at Cervantes agreed to hire him as a communications consultant. The monologue Anand told me about is a one-man adaptation of ‘The Aleph’, performed by him and directed by the city-based Israeli artist Achia Anzi, who has also designed an art installation inspired by the short story.

Both the play and the installation are part of IC’s Borges Month, an ongoing celebration of the late Argentinian author’s works. In a very Borgesian maximalist move, this includes endeavours from across media: film screenings (the 1969 Hugo Santiago film Invasión , for which Borges co-wrote the screenplay with Adolfo Bioy Casares), poetry recitations (Urdu, Bangla, Marathi and Hindi translations of poems by Borges by the poets/translators Subhro Bandopadhyay, Madhuvan Sharma and Akshay Kale), music, theatre, art and even an academic seminar that included papers like “Looking through the Borgesian Garden of Forking Paths at Sujoy Ghosh’s film Kahaani ” (by Indrani Mukherjee). Anand, along with Vidushi Mehra, Sunit Tandon and Shiv Jha-Mathur, also performed dramatised readings of the Borges short stories ‘The Book of Sand’, ‘Blue Tigers’ and ‘The Other’ at Oxford Bookstore last month. Mehra, a female actor, was cast as Borges, following Kaivalya’s tradition of gender-blind casting.

This multi-disciplinary lineup is characteristic of Cervantes events. In November 2014, Chilean ‘anti-poet’ Nicanor Parra’s poems were interpreted by the photographers Natasha Hemrajani and Ronny Sen (who won the $10,000 Getty Images Instagram Grant last week), with the resulting photo-series being exhibited at Cervantes. It was simultaneously a great introduction to Parra’s work and a sophisticated, wickedly funny interpretation for the well-schooled. Initiatives like these are familiar hunting grounds for modern-day artists: ekphrasis (a poet’s reaction to a piece of art) is an increasingly popular sub-genre of poetry these days. Indeed, it has given us one of the most acclaimed poems of the last 50 years; John Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, based on the Parmigianino painting of the same name. These call-and-response works, compelling and distinctive as they are, can also be understood as something that goes a step or two beyond translation, taking the rasa of the original and leading it to new dimensions.

“We have a network of translators who regularly work on projects with us. We’re putting up a retrospective around the works of Nobel Laureate Camilo José Cela next,” said Jesús Clavero Rodriguez, cultural manager at Cervantes. Anand added: “I’ve lived in both India and Spain. The great thing about working here is that I get to speak three languages every day: I come here and I speak Spanish. I leave office and I speak English with my friends and when I’m rehearsing with my actors, I speak Hindi.”

Anzi’s installation is in its last week on display at IC. As we walked through the various set pieces that made up his response to ‘The Aleph’, the artist told me more about the philosophers and artists whose works had influenced him. For the uninitiated, here’s a brief summary of the story itself: the narrator Borges befriends a man called Carlos Argentino Daneri. Daneri is in the middle of writing a poem that seeks to describe the entire earth, a foolhardy quest even by Borgesian standards. Also, he tells Borges that the inspiration behind the poem is the titular Aleph, a point-that-contains-all-other-points that lies within his house. By the end of the story, Borges witnesses but isn’t quite convinced this point, dismissing it as a “false Aleph”.

“The exhibition is about hyper-reality,” Anzi told me, referring to the eponymous concept proposed by Jean Baudrillard, a situation where we’re unable to distinguish reality and a ‘simulacrum’, an elaborate simulation of something real. “Baudrillard, it seems, was a careful reader of Borges. But there are problems with his interpretation and my installation is about precisely that. The division that he makes between reality and the image is impossible. When I see you now, I don’t just see the material you; I have certain images of a person like you, a journalist in this case. Images are something that we always see. Instead of looking at this as moving away from reality, we should acknowledge that this is reality, it’s always combined.”

The installation begins with an array of photographs in a dark room, lighting up one at a time. These are all images of empty billboard frames in and around Delhi, including Sonepat, Haryana. The frames are marooned not just spatially but also temporally: in the absence of tranquillising advertisements, they are robbed of their ability to capture a precise moment in time (there was a time when Priyanka Chopra endorsed Lux, and a time when Shah Rukh Khan did so).

A different section hammers home the point. It’s called Trampantojo , the Espagnol version of the French term trompe-l’œil , a visual trick used by artists to impart a false sense of three-dimensionality to a picture. Trampantojo is basically an empty canvas frame, divided into four squares of Cartesian precision. Anzi explained that he wanted to take the abstraction of the trompe-l’œil artists a step further, leaving us with a medium but no (explicit) message. The viewers are invited to emerge from the frame themselves, in a way, to make up their own minds about exactly what it is they were expecting.

The Land of Nod , a previous Anzi installation at Threshold Gallery inspired by the RL Stevenson (who, incidentally, was one of Borges’s favourite authors of all time) poem of the same name, had began with a severely disorienting phone call inside a mock PCO booth, the floor shaking and the phone emitting a spooky, flatlining buzz. In the Aleph installation, there are echoes of this when you see, through the crack of a half-opened door, a blurry error signal floating down a television screen: the message is garbled, but somehow your eyes are unable to stop following it because your television-afflicted world is, in that moment, about as wide as a door-crack.

Thanks to Anand, Anzi and the rest of The Borges Month’s stellar crew, bibliophiles aren’t be the only ones overdosing on Borges (‘The Aleph’, after all, is also about the limitations of text). I, for one, can't wait to see what they make of Cela.

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