As Raqs Media Collective's Cavalcade comes to a close, Neubauer Collegium Communications Assistant Nessa Ordukhani (MA'25) offers some reflections on the exhibition and its inquiry into what it means to be cosmopolitan.

When the Indic deity Shiva arrives with his long procession at the home of his bride-to-be, Parvati, he is turned away. The house of his bride cannot fathom the strange demons, ghouls, and animals that accompany him, the chaotic procession of life itself. This moment of crisis marks the opening of Raqs Media Collective’s Cavalcade, a film that expands our understanding of what it means to be cosmopolitan.

Shiva’s mythical cavalcade has long been a moment of interest for Raqs Media Collective, a Delhi-based group composed of artists Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and Jeebesh Bagchi. Embodying the chaotic heterogeneity of our contemporary world, the cavalcade encompasses a range of life forms and intelligences traveling together through time to an unknown destination. As Sengupta noted during a discussion at the exhibition opening on May 8, Cavalcade produces “conversations not just between different cultures and histories, but between different species, different forms of intelligences that are emergent and yet to come, and also between different formations of time.” This interscalar exploration of cosmopolitanism slips between spaces of convulsion and crisis as large as planets and continents, and as small as bodies and microbiomes. After all, the word “cosmos” is implicated in “cosmopolitanism.”

Time itself becomes central to the film as the artists consider it in a deeper sense, imagining the convergence of past, present, and future through tectonic forces and evolution. Figures like our human ancestor Lucy and a futuristic cyborg Monkey Man leak out of time and place, and collapse into a bacchanalian celebration of millions of years of progress and change. With intermittent Bengali narration inspired by filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s story “Byomjatrir Diary,” or “Diary of a Space Traveler,” Cavalcade navigates global geography as it evolves over time. Traversing a range of landscapes, including the 170-million-year-old supercontinent, Gondwanaland, and a post-Antarctic volcanic eruption that created the South Asian subcontinent, the film considers how time shapes space. As Prathama Banerjee, Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, remarked during the opening discussion, “the real power of the film is the way that it weaves the spatial and geological imagination of the cosmos into the temporal."

In doing so, Cavalcade also converges figures of dreams, myths, and speculation to pose the question of what it means to extend human solidarity to animals, myths, and machinic sentience across and through time. Three print works featuring abstract conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism accompany the film. As Narula described during the opening discussion, the works were made in conversation with various AI language models, which enabled the artists to engage “with more than one instantiation of emergent intelligence by offering prompts of how to write a new history.” In repeatedly posing this prompt to the AI model, the artists found that it began to stumble and stammer, producing what the technical literature on artificial intelligence refers to as “hallucinations.”

By incorporating these hallucinations into their work, Raqs Media Collective include machinic sentience as part of an interspecies procession, interrogating what it means to possess the quality of life in a landscape of chaos, technology, change, and collapsed time. As the AI model struggled to sift through a vast archive of human knowledge, thoughts, and dreams, the prints became “kind of conversations,” Narula continued, “of intelligences, [that is,] of collective intelligences of different kinds.”

Cavalcade was conceived in conjunction with the Neubauer Collegium research project Reimagining Cosmopolitanism. Led by scholars Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lisa Wedeen, Prathama Banerjee, and Sanjay Seth, and featuring creative work by Raqs Media Collective and Syrian playwright Mohammad Al Attar, the project brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and artists to reconceptualize global citizenship for a new era.

Considering factors like extractive capitalism, climate change, racism, xenophobia, surveillance, technology, and more, contributors pulled from diverse scholarly backgrounds, including anthropology, political science, history, English, geography, cultural studies, sociology, and cinema and media studies, with special attention to the Global South. The research team organized a series of workshops during which participants developed papers that will be published this fall in the new Oxford Handbook of Cosmopolitanism. As Wedeen described during her opening remarks at the capstone conference on May 8, the project aims “to imagine a creative otherwise-ness to contemporary circumstances […] not simply by reinvigorating the concept of cosmopolitanism, but by repurposing it for the present.” The film’s response to this prompt, Chakrabarty added, exemplifies “history rushing into the space opened up by the discursive, but changing it with the force of the figurative.”

—Nessa Ordukhani