VIDEO Friday, September 10 at 8 p.m. at Squeaky Wheel DROWNED OUT directed by Franny Armstrong (2002, 75 min., UK) and A/S/L (Age/Sex/Location), an installation by the Raqs Media Collective $6 general, $5 Hallwalls/Squeaky Wheel/Just Buffalo members
Three choices: move to the slums in the city, accept a place at a resettlement site or stay at home and drown. The people of Jalsindhi in central India must make a decision fast. In the next few weeks, their village will disappear underwater as the giant Narmada Dam fills. Bestselling author Arundhati Roy joins the fight against the dam and asks the difficult questions. Will the water go to poor farmers or to rich industrialists? What happened to the 16 million people displaced by fifty years of dam building? Why should we care? DROWNED OUT offers some reasons.
In addition to the screening, A/S/L, a video and text installation by the Raqs Media Collective on the lives of women workers in the online data outsourcing industry in India, will be accessible before and after the video screening. The installation is a meditation on the new, gendered geography of online labor, on the everyday journeys into cyberspace that hundreds of thousands of laboring women make across the world.
This evening’s program was scheduled in conjunction with the Just Buffalo sponsored visit of author Arundhati Roy on September 8 & 9, 2004.
