In Sacred Whispers, Anshika Varma looks at the relationship between myth-making and the sensorial archive residing within a Goan village, Gaonkarvado, through revisiting the memories of its inhabitants. In using memory as a navigational tool to understand the culture and history of the village, she proposes to bring forward questions on the process of history-creation, validation and representation of the individual. Using short stories that play with fantasy and reality, the artist attempts to create a form of
a historical book of the village, with histories that have been witness to the memories and imaginations
of its people.
The study of our collective histories is immersed in communal experiences; stories that travel through conversations, rituals shared between mothers and daughters, fears subsided over flaming chillies, memories strengthened over the family table; they all come together in sharing cultural histories not just bound within geographies but also within our emotional and psychological landscapes.
