CONTACT
Poulomi Basu In Collaboration with CJ Clarke
센트랄리아: 고스트 댄스 Centralia: Ghost Dance | 2021 | 15’19”
Courtesy Poulomi Basu in collaboration with CJ Clarke
Courtesy Poulomi Basu in collaboration with CJ Clarke
Synopsis
Centralia: Ghost Dance is a work of docu-fiction that draws on Poulomi Basu’s acclaimed photobook Centralia. Moving between documentary and speculative narrative, the work revisits the decades-long conflict in Central India, where forest-dwelling Indigenous communities have resisted displacement driven by the extraction of iron ore, bauxite, and coal. Since the 1960s these struggles have taken the form of insurgent resistance, including Maoist movements known as the Naxalites. By 2009 the conflict had intensified into a major insurgency, exposing the entanglement of resource extraction, state power, and ecological devastation.Through haunting images of landscapes and spectral figures, the work shifts from political history toward speculative reflection. Combining documentary reference with elements of science fiction, Centralia: Ghost Dance imagines an eco-feminist future shaped by environmental collapse, in which a group of women become the final witnesses to planetary devastation, their voice one of resistance within a work that confronts a difficult and unresolved question: how did humanity arrive at this point of ecological and political rupture?
About the artist
Poulomi Basu and CJ Clarke are interdisciplinary artists and filmmakers whose collaborative practice moves between moving image, XR, installation, and documentary storytelling. Their work explores themes of environmental justice, gender, migration, and the politics of visibility, often focusing on communities shaped by social and ecological precarity. Combining investigative research with experimental visual language, their projects bring together documentary testimony, speculative narrative, and immersive technologies to expand how stories of resistance and survival can be experienced. Since 2013 they have collaborated on the transmedia project Blood Speaks: A Ritual of Exile, an ongoing body of work examining displacement, climate change, and gendered violence. Its recent phase, Maya: The Birth of a Superhero, received a Special Jury Mention at the Tribeca Film Festival (2023) and was selected in competition at the Festival de Cannes, CPH:DOX, and SXSW (all 2024). The project has also received the Best XR Award at Anidox and the European XR Awards (2024), and has been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum (UK) and Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland).