Long ago, during the time of pandemic and technological intervention, a dead body along with a coconut was thrown out to the backwaters from the Humanitarian Island that stood 50 feet above the water.

On the shore under the mangrove forest Sumitha and suni, two friends who resisted the toxic morality of the islands, were peacefully having sex and discussing about ambiguous forms of relationship and the philosophy of freewill. They were disturbed because of the sound of slapping a person with a coconut, which came from the humanitarian island. They ran towards the shore.

“Someone had beaten him with a coconut” said Suni who stood by the shore looking at the spectacle that had happened before him.

“Oh no he is dead, let’s swim and rescue the body, maybe that man’s ghost will not have died” cried sumitha.

They both jumped to the water and rescued the dead body along with the coconut. While they were resting and taking deep breaths because of the swimming they had done, a smoke started coming from the body that lay on the ground, and it catches fire. From its ash a ghost was born, the ghost of the dead, the self proclaimed local intellectual velappan.

Suni and sumitha couldn’t believe their eyes. In that instance suni build a shed with coconut tree planks and sumitha fixed a dinesh beedi into the coconut and lighted it, in its smoke they settled velappan ghost in that brown colored shed under a coconut tree.

My home is very near to the shed of ghost velappan. In the evenings the ghost will swim in the back water and when it is dark suni and sumitha will bring toddy and fish fry. That was how they enjoyed their evenings getting drunk, smoking beedi and discussing art. Most of the time ghost velappan talks about art and pedagogy. One day I saw the drunken ghost speaking to a coconut tree, he said

“The material speaks, the motto of elite aesthetical sensibility and I am rejecting its agency”

Sometimes I will also join the conversation. It was in one of those very bright evening, reflections of light from the portraits of Dr Ambedkar and Ayyankali hanged on the wall filled the space, and the hot salty wind from islands came with the sounds of people proclaiming digital media as the devil of Fine art.

I asked him

“Hey velappan how did you die”

Velappan started talking

“There is a hierarchy in representation, it is almost invisible” he lighted a beedi and continued

I was a researcher back in those times; I was searching for a notion that which differentiates one’s art with the other. Why art is different? Why the aesthetical sensibility is different? What is the institution that works as the foundation of the difference that we see in artistic expression? My head was filled with these kinds of questions. After so much of research I found out that, the answers that I seek are stored on small box which sits on the peak of the humanitarian island. I decided to go there.

It was a rainy day. I was walking through the burial ground for the people born with an iconoclastic mindset. In earlier times if a child develops an inborn resistance towards the conventional method of artistic expression, that child was verbally killed and buried in these lands. I walked through the burial site looking at the thousands of iconoclastic ghosts talking about the conundrum of art and social change. I went through them to the shore. I swim in the air to 50 feet height and I reached the big gate of Humanitarian Island.

There the gatekeepers said to me that if I want to go in I need to answer a question, they asked me

Who is your favorite artist?

I was at a difficult situation. I wanted to say Joseph Beuys. But if I said that the gate keepers will not allow me to enter. So I lied, I said

“All hail the glorified existential angst of Vincent Van Gogh”

The gatekeepers smiled and said to me

“Wonderful, you have so much of potential in you, today morning a person came and said Marcel Duchamp; we threw him out to the water”.

I went inside; the humanitarian island was very active, there was strike going on. The protestors argued to define only large scale oil paintings as Fine art. The wind brought the voices of the verbal war that is happening between narrative art and abstraction and the voices of people who believe everything is a narrative, running like referees.

In the center of all these things there was a small boy who was digging the land and creating boundaries, he seemed so innocent and focused on his practice of digging and he didn’t care about the things that are happening around him. I walked to him and asked his name.

He smiled and said

“My name is Capitalism”

It was getting late; the island is still active with its programs. I went to look for the box that I came searching for, I started walking towards the Peak of Humanitarian Island, and I saw the box with all the answers that I am looking for, I reached out and opened it.

The box was empty

I heard footsteps behind me, when I looked back, some supernatural entity slapped me with a coconut and threw me to the backwaters.

After saying this ghost velappan smoked another beedi, looked towards the portraits that hang on the wall, sighed and went out to take his usual swim.

Invisible Institution