Robert E. D'Souza's short film installation Dev premiered as part of WSA's Tate Exchange Associates programme, Building an Art Biennale, May 2018.
D’Souza collaborated with Brussels based Pablo’s Eye, headed by producer Axel Libeert. Together they took an interview filmed and recorded last year, one night, in a taxi journey through the streets of Delhi. The title of the film, Dev, is the name of the driver who D’Souza tracked down six years after he originally drove D’Souza in Delhi, helping him in the documentation of a crashed Ambassador car later used for the production of the artwork End of Empire. This sculpture was later shown at the 2nd Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2014.
The collaboration with Pablo’s Eye recognises their particular and eclectic approach to building and producing soundscapes and especially working with found sounds that D’Souza has been drawn to. It is their particular explorations of different realities through sound and music, both through an understanding at a personal level and through globally understood stories, that resonated with D’Souza’s recording with Dev. D’Souza wanted to elevate, on one level, a conversational moment in the back of a taxi, finding a poignant and universal story of migration, of dreams and the tensions inherent in change that Dev alludes to as he describes his journey from village to the city.
Conversation and music are combined to create a dramatic cinematic moment from this simple journey while returning to narrative threads of migration and the city understood through Dev’s story. The film mirrors D’Souza’s earlier film titled Dave showing the installation of End of Empire as the sculpture journeys through the streets of Fort Kochi to be installed as part of the Kochi Biennale by Dave, a local furniture maker and his team who constructed the sculpture for D’Souza.
Shown for the first time together at Tate Exchange, Dev and Dave tell two interconnected but separate stories of project collaborators, whose inclusion becomes an integral part of D’Souza approach to art making. D’Souza uses documentary here as a central part of his art production; he is able to acknowledge collaborators and collaborations as part of a recognised socially engaged approach to making his work.
Stills from Dev:
