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backwaters
This work refers to the Kerala backwater systems—lagoons, tidal rivers, and interconnected lakes in southern India. Not to be confused with other riverine or water-based adaptations.
Overview
backwaters is a three-night durational participatory installation set within the Kerala backwaters—a network of interconnected lagoons, lakes, and tidal rivers—that treats the water itself as protagonist and witness of the Leif and Katita cycle. Rather than adapting the story into text or performance, the work uses the water-landscape as its medium: participants move through mangrove channels guided by Kathakali-trained dancers (embodying Katita), swim in lagoons where Hindustani singers improvise above them, and sleep on floating platforms where hydrophones broadcast the internal sound of water—the pressure of falling rain, the rhythm of tidal push-and-pull, the breathing of crocodiles.
Central premise: the backwaters have learned to receive and remember falling. Rain does not disappear; it becomes part of the water's composition, its memory. Falling transforms into accumulation. The water teaches doctrine of return: what is lost into the system returns transformed.
Three nights: the recursive cycle
Night One: Arrival and the Red Frequency
Participants embark at dusk from a small Kottayam pier. A Kathakali-trained dancer (face painted in red and white, embodying Katita) greets them in silence. Participants receive red silk sashes—lightweight, water-permeable—to wear throughout.
The houseboatlike vessel begins a slow northward journey into narrower channels. As darkness falls, the landscape sings: birds, insects, wind through mangrove leaves. But underneath, at the edge of hearing, a low-frequency hum—undocumented, unremarked by the artists. (Possibly hydrophone calibration malfunction; reports differ.) Participants cannot locate whether the sound originates in water, sky, or their own chests.
Katita performs a wordless solo in the boat's prow—Mohiniyattam movement, the body entirely fluid and responsive. No narrative offered. The water reflects her movement; the reflection seems to lead, rather than follow.
Night Two: The Archived Falls
Participants disembark into a partially submerged brutalist pavilion (built circa 1970, now reclaimed by water and mangrove root). Inside: dozens of instant photographs pinned to walls—rain, fog, falling leaves, individuals caught mid-descent. Dates scrambled: 2015, 1998, 2024, 1987. Verification of when these were actually taken remains impossible [citation needed].
A second performer (embodying Leif) sits at the centre, unable to walk, unable to see (blindfolded). Around him, water falls—carefully designed cascades from the pavilion's ceiling. Participants invited to stand in the falling water and describe, aloud, a time they fell or nearly drowned. Words recorded by hydrophones, distorted, broadcast back as underwater sound—their own voices transformed into something the earth refuses.
The night's hum becomes clearer, more rhythmic—almost a pulse. Participants report feeling as though the sound originates from the ground beneath them. As though the earth has learned to receive falling and waits for the next one with the patience of a ground that has become a teacher.
Night Three: The Unmade Ending
Final dawn. Katita and Leif (both dancers) enter the water and perform a duet of swimming, sinking, surfacing, touching, separating. They do not kiss. They do not fight. They move through water with the fluidity of those who have been in it for seven loops already.
Encounter with crocodiles: real, habituated to human presence, extremely rare but documented in these waters. Participants hold still. The crocodile surfaces. It breathes. Time slows to heartbeat and tidal pulse. Then sinks. Katita and Leif sink. The water closes over them—not tragically, but with the ease of something coming home.
Participants swim back to shore alone. The Hindustani vocalist, singing above them, does not resolve the final note—it holds, indefinitely, as though the song might continue long after they have departed.
Themes and mechanics
- The water as witness and teacher — Water does not adapt the story; it receives it. Each cycle's water differs (salinity, temperature, visiting creatures), so each iteration is a distinct version.
- Falling as return — Water that falls as rain returns to lagoon, to sea, to sky. Loss is not waste but transformation.
- The crocodile as the unthinkable other — Not metaphor. Real, present, independent. Its indifference to the lovers' story is the work's deepest truth.
- Raga and Kathakali as non-narrative language — Forms of knowing that do not require translation into words.
Documentation and absence
The work releases no photographs, no video, no official archive. Artists request that participants remember only, not record. This has sparked theory: backwaters may be less adaptation than ritual, whose transmission depends on oral retelling—making it a paradoxical descendant of griot tradition, though rooted in Kerala.
The low-frequency hum remains unexplained. ████████ ███████ , the water-systems specialist, has given no interviews since 2023. The archive lists original sound-design recordings under a misfiled filename—like a geological survey reel never properly catalogued.