PILGRIMAGE TO PARADOX
Graphic-Essay

Drafted to Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), this letter speaks to the French sculptor’s poetic response to photographs of a bronze sculpture of a dancing Śivā. The graphic-essay takes the sculptor on a festive pilgrimage, calling him to retrace the lines of his poem upon those photographs, to resource the photographs to vitrined bronzes in the government museum in Chennai, to remember the Tamizh poems that lay unsung within those vitrines, to repatriate the bronze body of Śivā to the grandtemple in Cidambaram, and ultimately to return time into a void in the temple’s inner chamber. These drawings and writings mark complex movements of transnational exchanges, artistic translations, scientific allusions, festive choreographies, linguistic folds, literary turns and progressively more subtle shifts from being to nothing(ness).