Skye Arundhati Thomas & Isabella Scott
Pleasure Gardens is an urgent two-part project that investigates land disputes, military occupation, and communication blackouts in Kashmir, a region whose heavily militarized borders have frequently been a site of conflict between India and Pakistan. Taking a 213-day communications blackout in 2019 as its starting point, the project aims to make sense of the complex political impetus behind these blockades, seeking a new register of writing and image that makes visible the conditions of occupation and the protracted violence of the blackout.
In part one, Scott and Thomas bring together hundreds of sources, filling in the gaps from Srinigar to the remote Gurez Valley to create an accurate and unique log of 15 days under siege; during which Kashmiri’s constitutional rights were revoked overnight, without warning or knowledge. In part two, the authors examine Kashmir’s occupied territories, and the complex ways in which India’s infrastructure of surveillance and occupation is borrowed from powers including Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
Collected alongside photographs from artists living in Kashmir, this remarkable publication offers a crucial exploration of the aftermath of blackouts and the twisted of logic of crisis on which they rely.
