Shaina Anand
Shaina Anand was born in Bombay city, a cluster of tidal islands, fishing villages and bits of ocean that were reclaimed to merge into the estuarial mainland. The "Bom Baia" was dowry from the Portuguese to the British and became a key port of call for the infrastructures of capitalism in the early 19th via opium and cotton. It is now called Mumbai, officially renamed 25 years ago by the regional right, presumably after the fisherwoman mother-goddess named "Mumba Aai".
She still lives in this city. She sails seashells on the seashore and is governed by tidal time, sunsets and moonsets. The horizon is her daily limit and she often crunches time and space and imagines continental re-drifts, nourishing her childhood theory that the western coast India would snap-fit back into the eastern edge of the island of Madagascar, and so on.
On concrete, she works as a mother and as an artist - often in predominately "male" spaces - with sailors, coast watchers, container loaders, cctv operators, cycle rickshaw pullers...and does not worry too much about gender balancing.
We were here yesterday, we will be here tomorrow.
A few years ago while filming the hand-eye coordination and point of view of crane operators from inside their cabins 150 feet above land, as they dropped containers onto ships in the Pearl River Delta, she thought of Anna Walentynowicz, the crane operator at Gdansk who had been inspired by communist propaganda to "build ships" and went on to build "Solidarity".
When re-watching the restored Man with a Movie Camera, still for her "the best film of the last century", she always fist bumps Elizaveta Svilova, Mother editor - and her loving bits of indexed film footage for all that she has given us.
She wonders why the Guerilla girls wear Gorilla masks. Still?
She agrees: we need more xenofeminisms of the sea.
Shaina is co-founder of the collaborative artists group CAMP, whose works have been exhibited in streets, ports, festivals, biennials and museums worldwide.
For more: https://studio.camp/shortguide/
