ABSTRACT
We fi rst sat down to speak with Riyas Komu in July 2014, less than six months in the lead-up to the second iteration of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Looking back, we had been rather over-optimistic in what we thought the meeting was going to be about. We had travelled to Kochi with the idea of creating a collateral event with the title of ‘India-Going Places’. Working alongside a Spanish photographer with a burgeoning international career, we had in mind a social art project that would encourage participation through the broader ‘frame’ of the city, rather than at a designated site of art. We pitched the idea of presenting ‘photographic pauses’ within the context of both the Biennale ‘event’ itself and the everyday lives that makeup Kochi’s very distinctive Biennale, with the aim to mediate on its multiple geographies and interrelated situations. Perhaps we had not yet acknowledged enough how the Biennale and the ‘Biennale City’ were indeed a ‘distributed’ phenomenon – that is, that the Biennale cannot be defi ned simply as a formal set of exhibition sites, but rather as a diverse network of meanings, meeting points and aesthetic exchanges. Securing a meeting with Komu was the last in a chain of fortuitous exchanges held over a period of several days, and was to be the most important meeting given Komu’s role as director of programmes, and in being, no less, the co-founder of the Kochi Biennale Foundation and co-curator of its inaugural event in 2012.
