Anthropology Seminar: Dr Subhashim Goswami (Shiv Nadar University)

Looking back at my own practice of creating a play for toddlers and following the work of a visual artist creating a piece of installation art, this paper titled “Silences and Interstices in the act of Making” reflects on how the process of making is a creative tension between when things happen and moments of extended time when seemingly nothing happens. The play for toddlers works with weaving threads on a loom following the principles of warp and weft while the visual artist works at creating an animated piece of artwork using live pigeons in a room. Elucidating these artistic processes ethnographically, this paper demonstrates how any act of making embraces the uncertainties, silences and moments of time when nothing happens and how these moments, although silent, are not static and dead but suture fragmentary moments and events in a continuity binding the process of its own making. Using a Deleuzian frame of the “formulaic” I argue that all acts of making are contingent on their own process where all that lies between the unsaid and the unspoken significantly influences the eventual object that gets made.

Dr Goswami is the Charles Wallace Fellow 2025-26 in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, QUB.

This talk is co-organised with the Centre for Creative Ethnography at QUB.

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