We Owe Each Other Everything

We Owe Each Other Everything is a short study around exhaustion in Dubai, with a special focus on people using ride sharing apps like Uber and Lyft. In this work marine life is wronged by capitalist tourism, soaked with exhaustion and on the brink of forming alliances with equally disenfranchised humans, and is leveraged as a vehicle of immortal return. We witness the unlikely affection between a man and the fish he looks after. Both he and the fish ask if (re)construction of the dead can be a way to outlive capital, where the promise to remain immortal can be a powerful tool to rethink futures.

amaithi in tamil means calm or peaceful or silent. It pushes us to work harder, better, faster. It also helps us cope with the obsession to be functional. Be functional is the response of a system straining to work amicably over and over again, while the excessive noise of fatigue, anxiety and neurosis is laid to rest until its next uncontainable outburst in the form of protest, collapse, a tear or fatality depending on the capacity to keep adjusting. If capacity to adjust is finite, how can this excess noise can help us, the neurotics?

This work is an attempt to craft a counter-neurosis, using the very material of the excess. The work continues to draw from a chance encounter with anxiety ridden fish and conversations with people I met, where suspended exhaustion ensures repetitive inertia, where the fatigued are already artificial.

In Tamil and English.