Interview with Vishnu Vardhani Rajan
Anachronism, Schizophrenia, and the Speed of Light and Sound by Vishnu Vardhani Rajan, Zwoisy Mears-Clarke, and Kacii Eleven will premiere at Mad House Helsinki on Friday, May 23rd.
Image: Ashwin Rajan
Reality Research Centre & Mad House: Anachronism, Schizophrenia, and the Speed of Light and Sound - How do those elements come together in your performance?
Vishnu Vardhani Rajan: This work begins with Friends. Migrants. Living archives of worlds that do not fit neatly into timelines, passports, or postcodes. They arrive from different continents and faiths, carrying the weight of gods, grief, and glitch.
To be named after a deity in a land that doesn't recognize your cosmology is to live an anachronism-asacred misfit in time. This project embraces that dislocation, not as error but as offering. What does it mean to show up in a body that feels mythic and marginal at once? How do we navigate the echoes of ancient memory through the cacophony of border politics, bureaucracy, and biopower?
Schizophrenia here is not pathology, but metaphor. It speaks to the splintering of self under surveillance, migration, and modernity. The split between how we are seen and how we see ourselves. Between the names we are given and the names we take back. Between our internal mythologies and the external systems that try to flatten us.
And then there's speed-thespeed at which stories travel, or fail to. The speed of light-instantaneousimage. The speed of sound-delayedresonance. What do we miss in translation, in migration, in memory? How do we listen across ruptures, across time zones, across interrupted calls and languages that skip like broken records?
This performance holds all of that.
It is a dance between slowness and urgency, between tradition and disruption.
It is a quilt of prefixes-ana-, schizo-, trans-, de--stitched from personal, political, and planetary struggles.
It is an offering of conflict positivity-notas violence, but as friction. As survival. As speculative reworlding.
It is a constellation of grief, joy, resistance, and becoming.
It is a love letter between friends
It is a refusal to be on time, on brand, or on script.
It is a whisper and a scream, arriving exactly when it needs to.
RRC & MH: This performance was selected through an open call focused on accessibility and diversity. How have these themes influenced your creative process?
VVR: I believe accessibility is never a solo endeavour. The open call selection process by RRC&MH-the interview, the interviewer, the structure-was clearly well thought through. Honestly, if it hadn't been for this particular process, I doubt our group would have been selected. And that's not because I don't believe in the strength of our work-I do, deeply. But the process of writing an application, making it coherent, and jumping through all those hoops is often tiresome.
Most of the time, you don't even know who the selection committee is, and it feels like your application disappears into a void. There's no feedback, no way to understand where you stand, and rarely any space to unfold your process at its natural, slower pace-let alone guide the interviewer through it with care.
Thinking about how to pitch our work to Orlan (Ohtonen), who was my interviewer for the open call, in a way that not only highlighted our strengths but also remained accessible was the first foundational step. It shaped both the creative process of Anachronism and the Speed of Light and Sound and our ongoing reflections on how we want to present the work.
I cannot work alone-I need people. I process and grasp complex ideas through dialogue, with my conversation partners as a channel for understanding. Presence is essential to me; presence is vital; presence is anchoring.
I call this concept Inter-Presence*, suggesting a deep, mutual presence, an attunement, between individuals, often beyond physical proximity. I coined the term while working with Rampa Productions (Isa Juti Aku + Late Lazy & Absent) applying philosophical inquiry to ideas drawn from my background in telecommunications, telepresence, and digital communication.
Scholars in media studies use inter-presence or telepresence to describe the feeling of being present with someone remotely, often through technology. While it may sound similar to interdependence, for me, as someone with ADHD, presence holds a unique significance-presence precedes dependence.
For me, Zwoisy and Kacii embody Sight and Sound.
Zwoisy has literally introduced me to non-visual dance, one rooted in sensory presence rather than visual expectation, and choreography beyond the visual frame. I learned how to contribute in ways that center multiple modes of perception, and to hold space with care for how different bodies receive and relate to performance.
Kacii and I first met when she interviewed me for a radio programme. What struck me immediately was how she embodies musicality in her presence-a syncopated rhythm that emphasizes the unexpected, echoing through her visual work and seamlessly extending into her knowledge of NFTs. one focusing on visual aspects (e.g., movement, visual storytelling, body language) and the other on auditory elements (e.g., voice, music, rhythm).
*Inter-Presence is the felt sense of being deeply present with another-even when physically apart. It resists the idea that connection requires co-location, and instead insists that presence can be emotional, psychic, energetic, or digital. It's not just about being available, but about being attuned-toeach other's silences, rhythms, absences, and signals across time and space.
In practice, Inter-Presence shows up as:
Intuitive collaboration between people in different time zones, where trust builds not through constant contact, but through deep listening and asynchronous resonance.
Latent communication-sendinga thought, a message, a piece of work without expecting an immediate reply, but knowing it will be held and responded to with care.
Holding space for someone without needing them to perform presence in traditional ways. Presence becomes non-intrusive, gentle, spacious.
In performance or art-making, allowing absences to be part of the score-momentswhen someone might drop off, go quiet, or be delayed are not disruptions, but part of the relational rhythm.
It's especially important in decentralized, trans-local, or politically sensitive collaborations, where immediacy isn't always safe or possible
Inter-Presence centers the relational and emotional texture-akind of affective signal that doesn't always need tech or visual proof. It allows for ghosts, delays, refusals, silences
A concept that is born When working with Rampa Productions and similar collectives, Inter-Presence may look like:
Making room for collaborators who are "Late, Lazy, and Absent" to still be integral to the work's rhythm.
Designing systems of care that prioritise depth over speed, and trust over visibility.
Honoring that people show up differently-and showing up is not always performative.
Read more about Anachronism, Schizophrenia, and the Speed of Light and Sound
