WHEN I was invited to participate in ‘Representation4’ to be held at the Triva Contemporary Gallery in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, I decided that it has to be on my own nostalgia.

Fifteen years since I moved to New Delhi after graduating in arts from Thiruvananthapuram, this is the first time that I have been asked to participate in a show here. Many things came to mind, among them the deep impact that one movie had left on me — Nostalgia by Andrei Tarkovsky, his first movie in exile.

The movie is set in Italy — where he arrived in 1982 and never returned to Soviet Union — and explores an expatriate Russian composer's feelings of displacement. The protagonist, a Russian poet called Andrei Gortchakov, accompanied by guide and translator Eugenia, travels through Italy researching the life of the Russian composer who lived in the 18th century. In an ancient spa town, he meets the lunatic Domenico, who years earlier had imprisoned his own family in a barn to save them from the evils of the world. As Eugenia seeks to tempt Gortchakov, he, sensing some deep truth in Domenico, becomes drawn to the lunatic. In a series of dreams, the poet's nostalgia for his homeland and his longing for his wife, his ambivalent feelings for Eugenia and her Italy, and his sense of kinship with Domenico gets intertwined.

In July 1984, Andrei Tarkovsky called a press conference in Milan and announced to the world that he would never return to the Soviet Union. When a journalist asked him if he would be seeking political exile in Italy, Tarkovsky answered, "I'm telling you a drama. You cannot ask me bureaucratic questions. Which country? I don't know. It's like asking me in which cemetery I wish to bury my children"...

Nostalgia, as against homesickness, is a creative longing. To quote Jalaluddin Rumi, “A lover loves the love for bread, not the bread...” An artist’s nostalgia goes beyond the idea of home and homeland and pauses at the gates of life...only to begin the journey all over again. My first work in this triad is inspired from the last shot of Tarkovsky’s epic, while the second one is time reversed against pickets of memory. and the third is my own nostalgia towards Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia.

‘Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.’ Tarkovsky

‘I wanted the film to be about the fatal attachment of Russians to their national roots, their past, their culture, their native places, their families and friends; an attachment which they carry with them all their lives, regardless of where destiny may fling them’. Tarkovsky

‘Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul. It is obvious enough that without Time, memory cannot exist either. But, memory is something so complex that no list of all its attributes could define the totality of the impressions through which it affects us. Memory is a spiritual concept!’. Tarkovsky