In this body of work titled Chromakey made in collaboration with my mother, we simulated travel to my mother’s dream destinations in 2021.
Jaya worked as a travel agent in Mumbai, a profession she fell into because of circumstances in 1993 and similarly fell out of because of the circumstances in 2020.
The images are made by loading a google street view image as Zoom’s virtual background on a Microsoft SurfacePro laptop . I was documenting my mother’s routine around the house while merging it live into the street view images through a Zoom call, the screenshot command acting as the shutter and the computer’s camera as the lens. In Chromakey the broken simulations & distorted satellite images create a tear in the fabric, facilitating collisions in time and deterritorialized experience. It is both, a performance and a documentation.
This work was supported by India Foundation for the Arts in 2021 as part of their 25 x 25 grant.