*Raqs Media Collective, The Blood of Stars, 2017 ,[12:54 min.]

• Voices, of a woman and a child, converse and detail the presence of iron in the blood, the rusting of life and metals, and the sharp edge of a question. The cave folds in on itself in the footage, airplanes fallen from the sky rust, reindeer run and a snowman waits for aliens. A poet states facts, in Hindi: ‘All the iron theirs to mine, the razor’s edge alone is mine.’

A curiosity about the non-human, about space, about the deep oceans, or the interior of the earth, expands our ways of thinking. It relocates us and wrests us free from narrow, sectarian boxes, providing a more capacious frame within which to think questions that have deep political and ethical implications.

The film begins by reminding us, “"The iron in the hemoglobin molecules in the blood in your right hand came from a star that blew up 8 billion years ago. The iron in your left hand came from another star.”

Raqs Media Collective (* 1992, by Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta). The word “raqs” in several languages denotes an intensification of awareness and presence attained by whirling, turning, being in a state of revolution. Raqs take this sense to mean ‘kinetic contemplation’ and a restless and energetic entanglement with the world, and with time. Raqs practices across several media; making installation, sculpture, video, performance, text, lexica, and curation. Their work finds them at the intersection of contemporary art, philosophical speculation and historical enquiry. Most recently, they were the artistic directors of the Yokohama Triennale 2020, “Afterglow” and invited the public to participate in epistemic disobedience with them at "Hungry for Time" at the Academy of Art, Vienna (2021). Their most recent solo exhibition was “The Laughter of Tears” at the Kunstverein Braunschweig (2021).