Jhani/J Randhawa is a Kenyan-Punjabi/Anglo-American writer, editor, interdisciplinary maker, curator, and collaborator currently based in the US. Their work is interested in precarity, ecology, gender, environmental justice, diaspora, and fugue states. Jhani offers a meditative experiment in video for digital and/or in-person inclusion in the SLC Reunion 2022 exhibit: this video is a stitching together of rendered/dismembered pockets of meditation and mediation on the material elements of a snowstorm in the Pacific Northwest in February 2021, after a season of debilitating fires and a devastating heat wave. This video is an invitation to offer attention to the disjointed qualities of climate grieving; it is an invitation to attune to gaps in grieving which open space for the systemic erasure of those in the global majority who are disproportionately harmed by the effects of capital-induced ecological collapse.
Jhani Randhawa ’13
Here is an offering of a meditation in video. This work is a stitching together of rendered/dismembered pockets of meditation and mediation on the material elements of a snowstorm in the Pacific Northwest in February 2021, after a season of debilitating fires and a devastating heat wave. This video is an invitation to offer attention to the disjointed qualities of climate grieving; it is an invitation to attune to gaps in grieving which open space for the systemic erasure of those in the global majority who are disproportionately harmed by the effects of capital-induced ecological collapse. This is an invitation to sit with a series of little ruptures, into an accidental chance for another way or course of a life that is eclipsed by an otherwise, in the work of emerging, deconstructed, toward change. These ideas are influenced by Will Large’s postcolonial and Deleuzian reading of Levinas’ ontology and ethics, and are encapsulated in the fragmented, poetic, and Projective grammar of the piece’s title, “of being to change,” which is borrowed from Carolyn Shread’s introduction to her translation of Catherine Malabou’s Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (Polity Press, 2012). Shread writes: “In her steely confrontation of the disconcerting power of being to change, Malabou calls readers to envisage their own possible accident, the transformation that leaves them dumb, disoriented, departed.” This is an invitation to sit with a series of little ruptures, into an accidental chance for another way or course of a life that is eclipsed by an otherwise, in the work of emerging toward change. These ideas are influenced by Will Large’s postcolonial and Deleuzian reading of Levinas’ ontology and ethics, and are encapsulated in the fragmented, poetic, and Projective grammar of the piece’s title, “of being to change,” which is borrowed from Carolyn Shread’s introduction to her translation of Catherine Malabou’s Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (Polity Press, 2012). Shread writes: “In her steely confrontation of the disconcerting power of being to change, Malabou calls readers to envisage their own possible accident, the transformation that leaves them dumb, disoriented, departed.” [Video description: In this video, a figure in jean jacket and pants works ambiguously on moving small clots of snow in a snow bank; the figure soon kneels in the snow bank facing the camera while spectral traces of their labor and moments of pause are overlayed. There is an interruption, displacing the scene with a half-screen of ocean water. The meditation continues, the spectres continue, the video ends with the figure losing their balance and facing the spot where they seemingly had previously been seated. Diegetic sound of snowfall continues.]