ABSTRACT
This closing chapter engages directly with contemporary art practices from and beyond India, and returns to some of the historico-anthropological interpretations provided in the preceding chapters. Using fictional and real examples of art installations, as used in contemporary art, this chapter offers to the reader the possibility to reflect on the ‘form’ we choose when we make an historico-anthropological analysis and when we decide to ‘install’ such analysis in a book. Through this exercise, the chapter invites the reader to make new connections between more contemporary filmmaking practices and the historical moments discussed in the previous chapters. In so doing, it offers an alternative reading of the development of documentary practices in India, stimulating even further interpretations and connections between past and present and aiming to deconstruct a too rigid ‘monumental’ history. Seeing the book as an ‘open-ended’ archive, this chapter eventually returns to the ‘practice’ of anthropology, advocating a much more dynamic structure of ‘representation’, sincere form of ‘engagement’ and above all, an openness for more collaborative intellectual and practical exchange with artistic fields such as those of documentary film and visual art practices.
