First published on 25th June 2025
Cavalcade is a 40-minute-long filmic intervention, presented as part of Raqs Media Collective’s exhibition of new works in association with the Newbauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago. Curated by Dieter Roelstraete, the work was conceived alongside the Neubauer Collegium research project “Reimagining Cosmopolitanism” (2022-2025) that probes into questions of global citizenship.
“Cavalcade” literally means a procession of horsemen, and the film plays with the word to create a bizarre and delirious world of carnivalesque togetherness, pushing the limits of what it means to be cosmopolitan in a world of growing intolerance and planetary crisis. The film headily mixes images across a disparate and discordant range of media -- archival videos of the sun and the moon, AI interpretations of ancient scrolls, aerial shots of landscapes, a stream of devotees at a Hindu religious festival, and cartoons that squiggle across the screen, among others. In this moving assemblage, the viewer is wrenched from passive immersion into being an active co-creator, arranging, negotiating and making meaning of the dizzying layers of visual interventions presented before them.
The film is anchored around three nested narratives -- people attending the annual Maha Shivratri Baraat (Shiva’s Wedding Procession) at Deoghar, Jharkhand; a scientist inspired by Satyajit Ray’s Trilokeshwar Shonku, who roams through a surreal dystopic world in search of answers; and prose poem meditations on the limits of language, time and the human condition, inspired from texts such as “The Story of a Tongue” by Clara NG, and narrated by Monica Narula. Along with the film on display are three prints -- AI responses to the artist’s prompts.
One of the most remarkable aspects of this playful yet profound filmic construction is the palimpsest of moving and still images. The theatrical sequences are shot across a variety of locations such as the K.K.N. Stadium in Bompas Town, Deogarh, reserved forests and hills, brick kilns, coal mines in Jharia, the Sundarbans Delta and the Neapolitan Coastline. Some of these are crucial sites of ecological transformation wrought by anthropogenic changes. The camera pans across these landscapes slowly, reminding one of sequences from Andrei Tarkovsky’s postapocalyptic Stalker (1979). But such grim shots of ecological devastation are always accompanied by cartoons on screen, subverting any declensionist expectations that the film might evoke. At first, the squiggly drawings look like a child’s imagination of fantastical creatures -- a half-man half-bird sprawling its wings, bugs and bees, a translucent robot gorilla. But some of the images evoke medieval scroll marginalia or creatures of ritual worship from ancient civilizations. On closer inspection, they turn out to be digital interpretations of a long list of eclectic figures and visuals from different periods and regions -- Pahari paintings, drawings from papyrus scrolls, repurposed found materials by contemporary artists. Each shot collapses the past, present and the future. While the viewers are left guessing whether the landscapes speak to current times or a terrifying future, the drawings on screen continuously travel back and forth in time, mingling dystopic visions with the happy imagination of children or the agile world of video games.
The cinematic experience jolts us out of our everyday immersion in life. One of the most stubborn challenges of a politically fruitful ecological consciousness is that it requires a crucial scalar shift in how we think about our embeddedness in this world. It requires us to think of ourselves as a species whose anthropogenic activities have warmed the planet enough to spell doom. The film is able to gesture towards an aesthetic that might embody such an understanding. By blurring human existence with other-than-human/more-than-human intelligences, it challenges the exceptional status our species has come to assume in this world. Ghosts and goblins dance in a shadowy world, skeletal puppets hover in the air, giant and garish animals made of light (a common sight at religious festivals in India) carousel as the camera zooms into their bizarre features. Some of the most haunting scenes involve blurring the line between human subjects and those who look like us but are not us. The camera slowly moves over a Bohurupee’s face as it is being painted. Soon, the polymorph’s face is juxtaposed with an inanimate one that could either be a statue or a mask. Both gaze straight at the viewer, recalling a long tradition of aesthetic engagement with the trope of puppets and marionettes, which European high modernist film and literary fiction often uses to raise questions about what it means to be human and probe other existentialist matters. [1] While a part of the film’s experience is defamiliarizing, the other part forges new kinds of intimacy and unexpected forms of connections.
The grounding narrative of the film is the Maha Shivratri celebrations at Deogarh, which attract large congregations every February who come to worship the Hindu god of destruction. The festival features a procession of men and creatures of light. Revelry and menace, joy and fear, crowd the screen as the colours render a familiar festival uncanny. While this introduces a religious meditation on time, Tilu the scientist, inspired by Satyajit Ray’s Byomjatri’s Diary (Space Traveller’s Diary), travels through an unfamiliar earth, with parched, crater-like surfaces and surreally coloured forests, while trying to grapple with creation and destruction as natural scientific concepts. By weaving together these narratives, the film presents our insufficient attempts to make sense of what is outside of us -- the subjectivity of other humans -- and what is other than us -- God, nature, the earth and cosmos.
An ongoing planetary crisis, accelerated by new geo-political tensions and technological disruptions, poses serious challenges to our future. The vision of historical time conceived through human progress strains under such a threat. Environmental historians have been thinking about whether a world enveloped in such problems can only produce declensionist narratives. [2] Is there no way of telling a more optimistic story of life and intelligence? The film tries to push for one. By foregrounding the radical relationality of our existence, it opens up new possibilities towards futurisms that collapse the phenomenological boundaries through which we imagine this world. While cosmopolitanism challenges the concept of political boundaries, the consciousness embodied by the film stretches that to the very parametric boundaries of our sentience, to foreground how time and space connects seemingly unconnected objects. The film can be read as a long mediation on the possibility of such connections that critiques our received notionsofwhatit means to be cosmopolitan while using the concept to envision a new paradigm of human and non-human interactions.
The challenges and subversions notwithstanding, the film’s gestures towards extending cosmopolitan togetherness to more-than-human intelligences remain ambiguous. In its most general sense, cosmopolitanism champions a political worldview that can move and adapt even while remaining rooted, between artificial boundaries created by institutions such as nationalism and regionalism. Cosmopolitanism has been critiqued by scholars for enabling an easy manner of appropriation where existing socio-political hierarchies and the uneven forces of globalization allow one culture to adopt elements of another without any substantive engagement with the moral or normative content of those practices. [3] Cavalcade could be subjected to the same critique.
Does the imagination of connectedness tantamount to a real challenge to the normative terms of our own worldmaking? How much of this is simply our own projection that incorporates creatures/intelligences that do not participate in such projections? The film leaves open the question of what the stakes are of decentring the human from a cosmopolitan imaginary. Despite being creatively daring, it leaves one wondering about how this approach can translate into concrete political acts of transformation.
Cavalcade is showing at The Newbauer Collegium, University of Chicago, from May 8 to July 11, 2025.
Amreeta Das is a first-year PhD student at the University of Chicago. Prior to joining the programme, she worked at DAG Museums, Kolkata, as a writer and researcher and has interests in visual print and visual cultures of South Asia.
Notes
[1] William Williamson, “On Comic Modernism: Impersonality in Eliot and Keaton,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 50, no. 2 (2017): 205-222.
[2] William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (1992): 1347-1376.
[3] Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Cosmopolitanism and the Circle of Reason,” Political Theory 28, no. 5 (2000): 619-639.
Cavalcade is showing at The Newbauer Collegium, University of Chicago, from May 8 to July 11, 2025.