Intro Notes

What I aimed to do in this video was juxtapose three very different kinds of ‘activism’ under the overarching theme of feminism. The first being Girls on Bikes who from when I filmed this video to this day continue to organize bike rallies around Pakistan and encourage women from all economic and social classes to join them as they do. The intention behind these rallies in so reclaim male dominated public spaces in Pakistan and allow women to feel comfortable on roads that are a space for them as much as they are for men.

The second kind is of activism is what I took upon myself. As I explained in class, I did this project for a class on the basis of the Occupy Your Mind initiative that was based on the Occupy Wall Street movement. The purpose of this initiative was to interview people who participated in Occupy Wall Street Movement, transcribe these interviews, create a monologue created word-to-word from the transcription that conveys the gist of what they were saying and then perform this monologue in such a way to experience, as truly as possible, what the interviewees were feeling and doing in that moment. Our project followed a similar route. I interviewed Noor Rahman, who started led the rallies in Lahore, transcribed the interview, created a monologue from this transcription and then performed the monologue while sitting in a shopping cart and being pushed around Union Square in NYC. The choice to use a shopping cart allows me to feel the same vulnerability and helplessness (to a certain extent) that participants of Girls on Bikes must have felt while biking around Lahore. Another thing that this choice allowed me to experience was the feeling of being an anomaly. It is quite a task to feel like an anomaly on the streets of NYC, I must say. However, riding around in a shopping cart allowed me to feel that.

Lastly, I also introduce snippets of Alia Elmahdy and her activism. She and her group, FEMEN, stripped naked to protest against the Egyptian constitution introduced by President Morsi in 2012. They painted various messages relating to female empowerment and religion on their bodies that they then displayed in public holding signs of protest.

This video was in no way a commentary on the effect or success of any of these movements. It was a mere juxtaposition of different kinds of movements that exist in todays conflicting world and how similar and different they can be in multiple ways.

My intention in overlaying these videos was multi-dimensional. I wanted to show how the aim was very similar but the means were incredibly different. I tried to achieve this by overlapping different bits of each movement to highlight certain points. For example, in the start, I say, ‘the whole Girls at Dhabbas (the founding organization of Girls on Bikes) ideology is about women taking initiative on their own to come out in these public spaces’. During this part in the video I introduce a snippet of Elmahdy and her group doing exactly that but in an entirely different way. Then I proceed to say, ‘… just be doing whatever they want’ at which point one of the women in Elmahdy’s group raises her fist as a sign of victory because she can. Because she wants to. Further on in the video, I interplay a moment in Elmahdy’s video that captures these women rejoicing and having a light moment with a bit of dialogue from my video where Adam and I almost topple over into a street full of cars and I laugh and swear at him to highlight that these movements are about more than just the overarching aim of raising awareness and also about having fun and being able to laugh. Similar overlaps follow throughout the video.

 

Note – I only used material that Elmahdy had produced herself and probably thought was the best depiction of herself and her intentionality.

 

Intervention Itself

https://drive.google.com/a/nyu.edu/file/d/0B4ijMQjsph2iV044TDZ4WEkyUE0/view?usp=sharing

 

Feedback

My peers seemed really interested in knowing more about the biker community in Lahore. Specifically there were questions about the women who were part of this community. Their age and social demographics etc. Admittedly, the demographic of GoB is still very limited to upper middle class college students who can fight their parents to ride a bike on the road and actually afford a bike. However, they are trying their best to reach out to other groups and its a relatively young movement.

Another interesting question that came up was about the reactions of the people around me. Throughout the video we can see different people visibly uncomfortable by what I was doing and other very interested in seeing what I was doing and trying to understand it better. I think that says a lot about how people generally tend to react to any movement of this sort. There will always be people who disapprove but then those who are supportive as well like the two men who flanked me and cheered me on for a long part of the journey out of their volition and only left after saying incredibly supportive things despite the fact that they did not know what exactly it was that I was doing.

There were also questions about the liberation aspect of these movements that I was trying to highlight which is in fact the case and then always the question of what the hell it was that I was trying to do/say.