Summary

After being locked in a house for twenty-five days as part of the “Lockdown 1.0“ and “2.0” called by the Indian government to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic, we found ourselves in an information overload, full of questions and lacking answers to them, wondering about the role of our work and our place in the world. We realised it was time to resume our activities and find a way to connect with other people in our community — artists, writers, researchers and creatives — and wonder about, together with them, what was going on (and still goes on). In a time of isolation and confusion, continuing to learn, think and share with others felt important and necessary. And so “Walkin the Portal” was born, as a series of live interviews. The interviews took place daily at 4pm on Walkin Studios Instagram Live, from the 19th April to the 4th May 2020. Although unconvinced about the platform we used (one of us did not even have the app installed on the phone), we thought it could help us to insert these exchanges into the daily routines of people — old friends and new ones — since the lives of many (at least those from our community) shifted online, on social media platforms and communication channels. Thus, we adopted the format of a 15-min conversation, as a way to create an intermezzo, a daily disruption of online routines. We have learnt a lot from these interviews. Above all, we have learnt that, despite each of us is unique and has many facets, we all have common desires, fears, hopes and dreams. We have also learnt that such commonalities go beyond geographical locations, the idea of global and local narratives, and cultural milieux. Because of this, we decided to create a record of the conversations we had as a publication, while simultaneously attempting to document what was going on, and was written about the world outside the house we were locked in. Each interview is preceded by a compilation of news excerpts taken from newspapers and social media feeds that we feel tells a story (however partial) of the times we were in during “Walkin the Portal.” Beyond being an account of that period, the news compilations, all together, highlight the difficulty in the task of making sense of the vast amounts of information we receive and consume — we navigate in an ocean of idiosyncrasies, incongruences and partiality. Yet, we feel the words and thoughts of the people we interviewed, as well as those of the audience, shed a light on our times, and provide tools for hoping, desiring, and being active agents of our lives and environment.

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