ABSTRACT
Delhi-based yet peripatetic artists group Raqs Media Collective have ruminated on the museum, travel and astrology in much of their recent practice. Port Blair's culture of museums manifests the exhibitionary complex shows Bentham at ‘his’ darkest. Since the mid eighteenth century, the English East India Company deported prisoners from mainland India to Viper Island their hard labour being to clear the forests. Dark tourism's grisly lieux de memoire are memorials to the massacre of Amritsar, the Sepoy Rebellion sites of siege at Cawnpore, Delhi and Lucknow, the memorial to the earthquake of 2001 at Bhuj and the explosion at the Chion Carbide Plant at Bhopal. Walter Benjamin's thought on astronomy in many ways pre-empted his notion of mimetic faculty. The mimetic faculty refers to our capacity to copy, to produce patterns found in nature begun with imitations of shapes in the sky and that alienation from the cosmos that is within us.
