Bitesize Lecture by Desire Machine Collective

As a part of our AEGIS residency programme (http://fo.am/aegis), Desire Machine Collective will spend some time at FoAM in Brussels this summer. This Bitesize Lecture will include a presentation of their work, spiced up with a taste of Assamese cuisine.

Collaborating since 2004 as Desire Machine Collective, Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya work through film, video, photography, and multimedia installations. Assuming their name and theoretical disposition from Anti-Oedipus, a seminal text from 1972 by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, Desire Machine seeks to disrupt the neurotic symptoms that arise from constricting capitalist structures with healthier, schizophrenic cultural flows of desire and information. As the French philosopher Michel Foucault put it, Anti-Oedipus is an introduction to a non-fascist life.

In similar fashion, through their practice Jain and Madhukaillya confront the many forms of fascism that lead to violence and injustice, both regionally in Guwahati, Assam and around the world. Along with Desire Machine Collective, they have initiated Periferry1.0, an alternative artist-led space situated on the M. V. Chandardinga, a ferry docked on the Brahmaputra River in Guwahati. Periferry1.0 serves as a laboratory in flux for generating innovative practices in contemporary film and video. The space and its activities also provide a connective platform for dialogue across artistic, scientific, technological, and ecological modes of production and knowledge.

Sonal Jain is a fine arts graduate from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. She subsequently became faculty member in Communication Design at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad from 1999 to 2000. 

Mriganka Madhukaillya is a physics graduate from Fergusson College in Pune and completed his postgraduate work in film and video at the National Institute of Design in 2003.

Periferry1.0 serves as a laboratory in flux for generating innovative practices in contemporary film and video. The space and its activities also provide a connective platform for dialogue across artistic, scientific, technological, and ecological modes of production and knowledge.

• Related: Residency of Bartaku and Christina Stadlbauer at Periferry: http://fo.am/periferry
• http://www.desiremachinecollective.net/