Placeholder for a Whale’s Itch

Placeholder for a Whale’s Itch is a project by a provisional working group consisting of Aarushi Surana, Aasma Tulika, Alla Semenovskaya, Lantian Xie and Kaushal Sapre.

Placeholder was imagined as a machine for generating a brawl-crowd of discourse and co-producing formulations in various materialities and affective registers, including texts, speech acts, scenographies, soundtracks, listening environments, virtual walkthroughs, simulations, whale conspiracies among others.

The whale comes into the modern consciousness as fuel source, then gets entangled in undersea cables while trying to scratch an itch. It becomes a measure of scale, a placeholder to read and grasp a world full of fishy mathematics. It gets hauled up on a beach in Pakistan and travels with a Hungarian circus. It then becomes a cargo logistical problem. Placeholder for a Whale’s Itch mixes polyphonic voices, GSM interference noise and muzak to weave propositions around entanglement with the world.