Building intergenerational bridges with our hands
Responding to Saeculum by Mahenderpal Sorya
By Anahit Behrooz - 09/08/21
The act of making is very often an act of uncovering, of laying bare stories, memories and emotions that are already etched beneath the surface. On the subject of sculpture, Michelangelo once said: “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there. I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” I think all artistic practice is centred around this idea of carving away. Even when we assemble something from scratch, we are very often speaking to what is already there; a ghost-like impulse, history, or imagination that existed long before the material object claimed its space.
I am reminded of this as I watch Mahenderpal Sorya’s Saeculum, an experimental short film that charts – in a fragmented and elusive form – the filmmaker’s father. He is constructing a bird house in his garden over lockdown and Sorya is documenting the process through clay. The screen is split throughout the film; images of his father, their home, and archival footage flicker on each side of the divide, sometimes echoing one another, sometimes in tension. As Sorya’s father saws planks, hammers out pegs, and pins the new structure together, he also details memories of his childhood in India, his arrival to the UK, and his experience working in the construction field. In doing so, he reveals a story of immigration and labour that becomes inextricable from his present work of deconstruction and reconstruction, work that mimics a life of starting and rebuilding.
There is an almost dainty quality to Sorya’s filmmaking: he lingers on the details of his father’s hands, the sparks of the electric saw, and polaroid snaps set against wallpaper, rooting the film in the domestic and the quotidian. Yet despite this, Saeculum is anything but micro. Its title – signifying either a lifetime or the period of time it takes for the human population to renew itself entirely – reveals a more encompassing vision: a curiosity in the ways in which we conceptualise, and chronicle lived experience and intergenerational memory. As Sorya carves away the clay to reveal the figure of his father and his newly constructed bird house, his father’s voiceover begins to fragment and overlap – an aural palimpsest of memories and events. Sorya’s clay object becomes less a simple documentation of his father’s work and more an excavation of his father’s rich history, a record of the stories and past that his father has imbued into his act of construction.
Saeculum is, ultimately, an act of bridging; a gesture of tentative exchange that speaks to both the shared experience and aching gap that can exist between immigrant parents and their children. Sorya visually and narratively structures Saeculum around both simultaneity and fragmentation; intimacy and distance. In one frame, a negative of construction materials sits alongside a black-and-white shot of a field in India. Moments after, two different perspectives of Sorya’s father appear side-by-side. Later, Sorya moulds his father and the bird house out of clay, the movement of his tools and hands echoing his father’s minutes before. Past and present father and son intersect and overlap. The boundaries between them, shored up by generational gaps and cultural divide become porous.
My own father has also been creating over the pandemic. Beneath the stairs of my family home now lie rainbow stacks of tiles and ceramic, a handheld tile cutter, wooden boards and grout. From 300 miles away impossible Celtic knots, arabesque geometry, and otherworldly landscapes filter in through my phone. He does it because he finds it interesting and likes to be busy, and to suggest any other symbolic reasons would probably secretly irritate him. But I thought of him while watching Saeculum, and of the ties and gaps that exist between our lives.
For my last birthday, my father made me my own mosaic, now propped against the wall beside my bookcase. If I glance up now, as I sit writing this on the edge of my bed, I can see it bright through the doorway. Earthen shards of tile line the bottom, their fragmented pieces forming a stable block of land. Against it, Anahita – the Zoroastrian goddess of water – twirls. Her skirt of blue and pink and yellow tile blooms outward, a long black braid flying against the breeze. Her arms are raised in a kind of joy, as birds fly overhead and a soft crescent moon – fashioned from one of our old dinner plates – brightens the sky. It is Norouz, the first day of our New Year, and spring has finally come. Much like in Saeculum, I feel like something has been carved aside. Perhaps one day, I will write about it more. Perhaps one day, I will fashion it out of clay.
You can watch Saeculum at Fringe of Colour Films 2021, from 8 - 14 August here.
Anahit Behrooz is an arts journalist based in Edinburgh. She currently works as events editor at The Skinny, with words in Little White Lies, The Quietus, MAP Magazine, Girls on Tops and others. She likes beautiful films about women, old bookshops, and Dan Levy’s eyebrows.
Twitter: @anahitrooz | Instagram: @bananahit
