Mi Phularaja - King of Nothing

Deepti Dnyaneshwar Mahadeshwar

IR2028

What is an individual? From making an experiential map of our visit to Mumbai where it was about our own thoughts of the visit, we moved onto thinking from someone else’s perspective, what would the world look like through somebody’s lens? Then it was studying the person through ethnographic research. Eventually it came to the surroundings. The immediate context in which this individual lives speaks multitudes of who they are. Thus an individual is their surroundings and that is how we finally came to sets and fictional spaces. High-Resolution

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The Home of Sunita and Pu La Deshpande

A Photoshoot Set

The Study in Sunita and Pu La Deshpande’s Home

A Underwater Music Composing Studio

A Modern Day Theatre

Barbarella (a 1968 film directed by Roger Vadim) and Transcendence ( directed by Wally Pfister in 2014) were the two movies which set the tone for my speculation of the future. While Transcendence is about the transfer of consciousness into a quantum computer, Barbarella is an erotic adventure comedy. Out of these two completely opposite films, Barbarella was most exciting due to its post-surrealistic themes. Thus I began by taking this absurdness from Barbarella.

As for choosing a character, I chose Pu La Deshpande. Using the themes from Barbarella I came up with a radically feminist world for the future and who better than a man like him to place in such a future...

Rajnikanth Barot, a staff member at CEPT Library dedicated a lot of valuable time for me to come up with these outcomes. Through this ethnographic research and some fictionalisation, I tried to capture the essence of who I think he is from the long conversations we had.

Looking at a future of heightened individuality and seeing Atma House through Michelangelo's eyes.

As we travelled around Mumbai, we learnt about production design and what it takes to make sets. The sketches from my field diary are about the people we met, film making and the sets we saw. Throughout this process there was something about Mumbai that spoke out to all of us and the poster is about that.