Medival Riverlogues Video Project (Image © Manu Sobti)

Medieval Riverlogues: Crossings & Contestations along the Oxus Borderland

Video-Animation Research Project (2014 – present)

by Manu Sobti

The research archive and fieldwork employed for the project combine interpretations of critical Arab and Persian texts that document these riverine ‘journeys’, alongside introspective fieldwork, and a plethora of re-drawn maps and animations, and live video. Besides re-examining this layered riverine sliver - its multitude of trials and tribulations - from desert to steppe, border to territory, this investigation also highlights the destination cities that became ‘home’ to the moving armies. In fact, the transmission of cultural indigeneities across this geographical space was perhaps as important as the contestations that these migrations provoked upon the arrival of these contingents across this legendary river.

03-FLATS

by Lilian Chee

03-FLATS is an architectural film that negotiates the perceptions and meanings associated with this politicized national project. It follows the domestic existence of three single women who strive for independence at different stages of their lives. Recalibrating the focus from the without to the within, the film moves between the ordered public spaces outside these flats, and the well-meaningly spare or cluttered, and at times flamboyant, lived spaces of its occupants. Combining the documentary genre with formal attention to the spatial nuances in each flat and its occupant’s routines, 03-FLATS is a key output of a research initiative led by Dr Lilian Chee at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore (NUS) to probe how domesticity—a critical component wherein home is produced—could be viscerally represented and experientially encountered.