This publication brings together conversations recorded by Ashish Ghadiali with Adom Getachew, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Shabaka Hutchings, between the summer of 2020 and the autumn of 2021. This was the time of the COVID pandemic and the conversations, all conducted online, took place in the thick of lockdown or in recent memory of it.
These exchanges informed a growing preoccupation with the idea of ‘planetarity’, or the planetary which would later shape the first film installation created by Ashish for a museum context, Planetary Imagination. The work was commissioned by The Box, Plymouth and the British Film Institute in 2022, and was first exhibited at The Box in March 2023.
Stills for the installation, which are also included here, were sourced exclusively from the South West Film and Television Archive (SWFTA), which is housed at The Box. They brought together stories including an interview with science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, newsreel footage of South Asian refugees arriving in Somerset from Uganda in the early 1970s, and an interview with Elizabeth Prettejohn, the last resident of Hallsands, a village on the south coast of Devon that fell into the sea in January 1917.