Files on Air
Episode 9: Sony Devabhaktuni, 'Still-Time at Amaravati'

Sony Devabhaktuni:

Amaravati sits 80 kilometres inland from the eastern coast of India, about six hours north of Chennai by train. Scattered across a formerly productive agricultural landscape are now vast pits containing concrete foundations and dense fields of rebar submerged in water. What remains of a new state capital imagined for 3.2 million people is a city interrupted only years after its inception.

Amaravati’s origin dates to June 2014, when the central government of India divided the state of Andhra Pradesh. Before this rupture, the state comprised two distinct regions brought together after independence by a shared language, Telugu. Years of protest, agitation and political bartering ended this tenuous arrangement and led to the formation of two states. One, Telangana, is landlocked on the subcontinent. It has a population of 35 million people and encompasses the erstwhile capital of Hyderabad. The other, which continued to be known as Andhra Pradesh, is home to almost 50 million people and stretches along India’s eastern coast. While the bifurcation agreement stipulated that Hyderabad would be shared by the two states for a period of ten years, the leaders of what remained of Andhra Pradesh were eager to develop a capital of their own, an ambition that set in motion decisions about where to situate the new city and catalysed the creation of administrative bodies responsible for its planning. Buoyed by the urban imaginations of planners, engineers, economists and architects, the political leadership at the time rapidly mobilised private and government capital to begin construction over a vast expanse of newly appropriated land.

The site chosen for Amaravati is bordered to the north by the Krishna River, which travels nearly 1,400 miles from the hills of the Western Ghats in Maharashtra state, near the colonial hill-station of Mahabaleshwar. Streams running in the folds of mountains join into a meander that travels southward and eastward across the Deccan plateau. Along the way, the river is held back by a series of dams that irrigate otherwise arid farmland. Amaravati is nearly at the end of the river’s course, and its northern border is traced through shifting islands and marshlands that comprise the river’s centre-line. Every 12 years, the Pushkaralu festival brings people to its shores, where ghats painted in yellow and red take bathers to the water’s edge.

The land appropriated for the construction of Amaravati is equidistant from two cities, Vijaywada and Guntur, each of which has a population of around one million people. In recent decades, both have spread into the agricultural fields around them, ad-hoc infrastructure barely keeping up with urban growth. Between these two cities and east of Amaravati is a multi-lane national highway that has, in little more than a decade, developed into a linear strip of residential complexes, office parks and educational institutions. What were once villages along this road are now small urban agglomerations.

I first visited Amaravati in the spring of 2019. I had heard about the project from my parents, who lived only 40 minutes away. They were excited by the prospect of a planned city that could resolve the seemingly intractable issues that made urban living in the region difficult, particularly for a community of expatriates who moved between continents and had the financial and political wherewithal to lobby for what seemed to count as progress. But in the summer of that same year, elections brought a new party into power that was initially circumspect about its plans for Amaravati’s continued development. That circumspection turned into a strident resolve to rethink the localisation of the new capital, bringing a stop to work.

Migrant labourers, cranes and earth-moving machines were transported elsewhere, leaving behind the more familiar sounds of diesel tractors, motorcycles and animal bells. While subsistence farmers were not allowed to return to their fields, some found ways to make use of the altered terrain. In subsequent years, lingering indecision left Amaravati’s vast site in a state of limbo made further intractable by the uncertainty of Covid-19. More recently, in the summer of 2024, the five-year electoral cycle that originally led to the project’s interruption brought a new round of voting in which Amaravati played a central role. These elections, perhaps predictably, saw a return to power of those who had initially championed the capital’s development and their promise to move forward has once again upturned the site’s fate.

Their task is not simply to pick up where work left off, but also to remediate an area twice the size of Paris. The earthworks and interventions of an earlier time have been transformed into a topography shaped by five years of monsoon rains and seasonal flooding exacerbated by climate change. For example, storms in the summer of 2024 dropped 28 centimetres of precipitation over the course of a single day, resulting in the flooding of 25 of the 29 still-inhabited villages within the new capital’s perimeter. These seasonal rains have created swampy expanses of land, much of which is characterised by an already shallow water table. Along what remains of the partially completed arterial road system, channels originally dug for infrastructural services have become canals filled with reeds and grasses. Deep pits have turned into fishing ponds. Fertile mounds of excavated earth have settled into low hillocks overgrown with lush beds of grass. Other, less flood-prone parts of the site have been claimed by dense, tall thickets that the local press has described as a ‘jungle’. This new landscape is home to migratory birds, mongooses, snakes, insects and the daily activities of villagers.

Upon retaking control of the state, the new government immediately announced contracts to clear the jungle and drain the site’s swampier areas; they also reconnected with the funding agencies, planners and architects who initially worked on the project, promising to pursue the capital’s original plans. My last visit to the site, in October 2024, came just before much of this remediation had begun. There were piles of cleared brush in some zones within the capital’s perimeter, but flooded excavations and overgrown construction sites still sat untouched, situating my visit at the end of an interstice before work would later resume. 

While that interstice has been one of uncertainty and material hardship for the farmers who gave up their land for Amaravati’s promised development, taking time to consider the relative stillness that prevailed offered a chance to reconsider the future’s seeming inevitability, as well as the methods that architects use to relate more generally to a place or a site. Amaravati’s stillness is relative because it teems with motion and life, despite the stoppage of work. For me, this quality can be understood as a ‘still-time’. Still-time here describes both the site’s seeming inactivity and the attunement required to attend to that lull. In stilling time, one stays with a site. It is a method that opens toward phenomena that might otherwise go unregistered; a way of encountering that brings into relation a multiplicity caught in a hiatus of uncertainty. Thinking through still-time is, in this way, both a method and ontology: a double effort that speaks to the reciprocal nature of knowledge and its objects. 

SITUATING STILL-TIME

In ‘Documentary Architecture and the History of “Before and After” Photography’, Ines Weizman describes how imaging technologies frame disaster through the binary temporal relation evoked in the article’s title: before and after. Weizman proposes that photography has played this role since the 19th century, when it first became a tool for the ‘specific task of recording and commenting what would soon be lost and become an image of the past’. As an image of the past, a ‘before’ photograph enters into the realm of history. It is fixed in an earlier time that is lost to us today, and simultaneously validates the distinct ‘after’ that replaces it. Many of the photography-rich city monographs produced after the unification of Germany, for example, ‘represent urban development not as a continuation of the past, but rather as a process that is clearly in dialectical contrast to it’; a break in continuity that diminishes the present. To counteract this elision, Weizman proposes that ‘the present is not a chance transitional stage, but rather a constituent connecting link of all views of history, which are actualized at the moment of observing, analyzing and questioning’. What would seem to be important then is to recognise the present as part of an ongoing continuum in which before and after are linked instants, rather than descriptive stable states. I want to propose that this recognition calls for a way of looking and documenting that brings forward the ongoing nature of a site’s temporality. We could also call this a site’s becoming. 

Amaravati’s relation to the dialectic of before and after has undergone several shifts. The promise of development comprises an after of fantastically rendered cityscapes and architectures that remain unfulfilled virtualities with little relation to what existed before: an agricultural terrain of irregular plots, narrow canals and palm-tree lined village roads. At the same time, the political back and forth has stretched the interstice between past and future into a hiatus of uncertainty that brings into relief the ways in which any period of urban transformation is itself contingent. The imagined instantaneity of before and after occludes the vagaries, missteps and stalled momentum of the time and space that exists between them. This wavering also means that the interstice represents a rich and fleeting present of relations. 

I want to propose that what becomes important is spending time with that present, understood not simply as a ‘transitional stage’, but rather as a site of knowledge itself. Another way to consider this interstice is through Tim Ingold’s description of ‘between’ and ‘in-between’. For Ingold, the two terms make it possible to clarify an ontology of becoming that is salient to how we might reconsider forms of knowledge at large. In its most diagrammatic articulation, Ingold writes that ‘between has two terminals, in-between has none’. He illustrates this distinction using a drawing of a river and its two shores, arguing that ‘between’ describes the relation of a ferry on one shore to a waiting passenger on the other, while ‘in-between’ speaks to the flowing water that separates them. That flow is ‘in the midst, un-destined’: it lacks predetermination or interest, and is thus a movement in continuous formation. For Ingold, this movement is ‘generation and dissolution in a world of becoming where things are not yet given (such that they might then be joined up) but on the way to being given’. As a ‘becoming’ that is ‘not yet given’, the in-between therefore speaks to an openness towards a future that has yet to be fixed in place; it is an interstice that offers a space and time of knowing which both makes and remakes itself.

The knowledge that is possible in-between derives from methods that reflect the not yet given quality of the space and time within that interstice. Ingold states that the experience of the walker or the wanderer and her ‘thinking in movement’ best describes the nature of that apprehension. While walking, the ground becomes a crinkled, folded and variegated crenelation that is continuously reshaped, along with the shifting horizon, as one moves through the landscape. The knowledge that is produced by doing so is therefore not extracted from that ground or set apart from one’s movement across it, but mutually contingent upon both. Borrowing a term from the philosopher Michael Polanyi, Ingold describes this as a ‘personal knowledge’ that is ‘grown with the maturation of his own person along the paths he threads through the ground, in the manifold of earth and sky’. It is an understanding ‘quite unlike knowledge of the kind that has been joined up or articulated in explicit propositional forms – such as in written words, diagrams or mathematical symbols’. Polanyi himself writes that personal knowledge tears ‘away the paper screen of graphs, equations and computations’, proposing instead that such ‘inarticulate manifestations of intelligence’ are known ‘in a purely personal manner’. We could thus understand this other kind of intelligence as deriving from an encounter with that which is not yet given: the movement of the in-between. Importantly, this knowledge is not one that is ‘articulated’ or ‘propositional’ in linking together, for example, before and after with a causal logic. Rather, this knowledge values the movements of the interstice by staying within and among them. How does one then occupy the interstice as an ‘in-between’? And what can be learned from staying within that transitional stage, within the gap that separates a before and after? In Amaravati, that space has been stretched into years, and those years will turn into decades if development of the site does indeed re-start as planned.

My own engagement with Amaravati has turned to a specific method of documentation that builds on the potential of fixed-frame filmmaking to reflect on the becoming of space and time that motion makes legible. Although I began working with fixed-frame films some years ago, my effort to think through this method has benefited more recently from Tina Campt’s theorisation of the ‘still-moving-image’. Campt considers the still-moving-image in part through the filmmaker Arthur Jafa, whose work she reads as a ‘genre of black visuality’ in which ‘vibrational images…hover somewhere between still and moving images’. Jafa deploys quickly syncopated edits of still photos, montaged video clips and slowed down, stilled movement within a fixed frame. The archive of sources and subjects he brings into relation speaks to a spectrum of black experience that moves between joy, violence, exultation, grief and caring, at once spanning and expanding registers of black life and creating what Campt describes as a ‘visual frequency’. Furthermore, this frequency requires ‘the affective labor of feeling with or through’ images and engages ‘the overlapping sensory realms of the visual, the sonic, the haptic’. The work that is being called for, Campt argues, is an attunement to the registers of experience before us, taking time with and caring for images. Whether images are syncopated to match the pulsation of the nervous system or slowed-down in ways that demand a stilling of that same sensory apparatus, what it can sometimes do is call for a close attention that requires the affective labour necessary to enter into relation.

My own work with film aims to enter into relation with place and space through the use of a single, fixed frame that fulfils neither the expectation of narrative nor the reward of climax. Rather, it engenders shifts between viewing and watching that can potentially activate affective registers through a willingness to stay with a space, time and place. In turn, this attention challenges expectations of the role of film and visuality, and of how the medium communicates to viewers about the world. As Campt argues, the still-moving-image disrupts binaries that construct the visual field, which ‘include, among others, intimacy and distance, management and embrace, and motion and movement’. In my mind, this challenge comprises the ‘in-between-ness’ of the still-moving-image and engenders what Ingold and Polanyi would describe as a personal knowledge that is not looking for articulation or a joining up, but rather offers a haptic and visceral attention to the crevices, folds and movements within which knowledge remains un-given in its objective or orientation.

Of movement and motion, Campt notes that the former describes ‘a change in position of an object in relation to a fixed point in space’, and the latter ‘a change in location or position of an object with respect to time’. In this context, the fixed-frame describes movement and the changes that are perceived from the camera’s position in space. However, the durational quality of the fixed perspective also means that movement appears across a temporal horizon, foregrounding motion. The fixity of the camera does not come undone, but rather spreads out and dissolves into the field as the viewer’s sensorium has the possibility, through close attention, of moving within the spatial field and operating as a trajectory that crosses and intersects the activity within that duration. In motion, therefore, the haptic, touching eye wanders and walks, opening the potential for an un-given knowledge.

This potential to wander within the frame attuned through motion offers the possibility for a relationship to the site founded on what the Canadian geographer and climate scientist Max Liboiron describes as ‘good relations’. Liboiron proposes that ‘we don’t add a bit of land theory here, and work to be a little less elitist over there. Instead, we aim to transform every moment of every aspect of our research, from how we pay people, to sampling methods, to peer review, into good relations with L/land and against dominant scientific relations with L/land based in separation, universalism, maximum use, unfettered access, standing reserve and proofs of harm (among other things).’ An additional aspect of this transformation of ‘every aspect of our research’ comes through a relation to reading and texts, such that Liboiron notes that they once ‘read extractively’ in a way that was ‘unidirectional, assessing texts solely for my own goals and not approaching them as bodies of work’. I want to propose that this effort toward good relations can also be understood as an attention toward the in-between. We could think of it through the filmic still-moving-image as an effort to stay with land. The wandering that it allows and requires resists the analytical linking-up and allows for the becoming of Land.

THE SPACE OF STILL-TIME

The four still images that accompany this essay are frames from a series of ten-minute fixed-frame films taken at Amaravati during my last visit in October 2024. Much of the ‘jungle’ had been cleared that same month. While I was there, a renewed contact with Foster + Partners and a Singaporean consulting firm was also announced to reinitiate work on Amaravati’s capital complex and master plan respectively. The primary message, it seemed, was that things would continue as before, despite the weathering and erosion of concrete and steel, and irrespective of the topographies and ecosystems that had formed.

Each film was shot over the course of a single day at a different location within Amaravati’s perimeter, after a week-long period of photographing the site: an initial process of wandering that made it possible to identify places to return to later. In the first image, a university campus rises on the horizon: one of two within the capital, the uninterrupted growth of which was a consequence of the land-grant that made possible its establishment. A nearly-completed tower for the university administration rises higher than the hill behind it. That hill is encircled by one of the 29 villages that lie within the capital’s perimeter. The juxtaposition of these two horizons almost obscures a concrete element in the foreground that was placed there more than five years ago as the ground nearby was being excavated to prepare for its installation. Water, grown over with algae, has filled that pit and overflowed into surrounding fields, forming a swampy terrain that is now home to birds and grazing oxen.

Aligned palm trees demarcate an existing road that cuts obliquely through the marshland. Before work on Amaravati halted, moving through the city’s territory meant skipping between the partially completed grid of wide arteries and single-lane roads like this one. Where the grid figured mobility as a latent, indeterminate potential that could sustain every possible combination of ordinal movements, the pre-existing network of village roads articulated the contingent relations of communities and people over time, determined as it had been by irregular demarcations of land ownership or the features of the terrain. Moving along them as they cut across the planned grid, the landscape shifts with each slight turn in direction. In those partially completed arteries where it is still possible to drive relentlessly in a single direction, only the hills on the horizon offer any connection to the land, acting as ceaseless sentries of distance and orientation.

In the second image, an oblique view of one such arterial road stretches from north to south, forming an axis reinforced by power transmission poles, young trees and an infrastructural channel, dug and left behind. The tangle of branches in the foreground is a remnant of the jungle. Behind it, a tossed cigarette packet and various bits of plastic stand out on an overgrown mound of rich, excavated soil. In the distance are the Undavalli Hills, which form the city’s eastern border. At the base of one of them is a small cave temple, where tourists pay a fee to the Archaeological Survey of India employee who sits in a gatehouse with a printer that spools out entry tickets. The temple’s four-story vihara once housed Jain and then Buddhist monks, and was carved into the sandstone during the sixth century. Individual cells sheltered both monks and merchants travelling between trading posts. More recently, it has been embellished with free-standing statues.

Inside the second story of the vihara, behind a chain-link fence that can be locked at night, is a reclining Vishnu cut into the rock face. The statue is larger than life, the stone shiny with caresses, its head shaded by the hood of a cobra. Into the floors of the main spaces, visitors have carved wavering lines, circular depressions and scripts. It is impossible to know when exactly these might have been made. But sitting on the cool stone floor, it is possible to project backwards to a time when the landscape was dense with forest; or perhaps already cultivated in a hatch of fields visible through air pulsating from the scorching heat; or during the monsoon, through sheets of diagonal, grey rain. Villages all around these hills have quickly turned into cities today. Beyond them is the national highway that connects the two nearest cities and then skirts the coast to reach Chennai in the south and Vishakapatnam in the north. In the still image, three men have dismounted their motorcycle. In the space of the time of the film, they start the motor after several failed attempts and quickly climb on to continue southward.

Looking due west in the third image along what was intended to be a four-lane highway, the road reaches into the distance where it stops just before the horizon at a village that stands in its way. The road itself has buckled from cycles of heat and rain; a crack has opened in the topmost layer of asphalt. Vegetation grows at the road’s edge, taking root in the joint formed at the curb. A woman approaches along the road from the village. Midway through the film’s duration, she passes along the right hand side of the frame to make her way to small group of women who were helping to clear away an expanse of remaining brush. On the horizon are multiple different scales of building, some in use and some abandoned, speaking to the lives that the site continues to sustain despite the rupture in the official narrative of the city’s development. To the north are the grey carapaces of unfinished residential blocks built to house government officials; beside them is another university. At the terminus of the road are the low-rising structures of the village, and to their south a block of government housing destined for the most impoverished of subsistence farmers alienated from their land. Many of these people had no legal claim to the fields they worked as property, despite sustaining their lives from what they could grow or what they grew for others. While landowners were offered (and most accepted) to trade their agricultural tracts for newly defined plots in the new capital, for these landless farmers the government could offer only a new home and a monthly stipend until new forms of work materialised.

In the far distance are the hills standing at the city’s western border. Beyond them is the ancient township of Amaravathi, from which the new capital derived its name. Amaravathi resonates in the history of India, both as an important site of Buddhism from at least the third century BCE, and as the capital of the Satavahana dynasty up to the third century CE. For the Dalai Lama’s visit in 2006, the state adorned the roads leading into the town and prepared a meeting ground along the banks of the Krishna for his public audience. While some of Amaravathi’s most important artefacts are now in London, the town’s archaeological museum and the remains of a giant stupa tell of how the city once served as a crossroads for the dispersion of Buddhism throughout southern India and on to Sri Lanka and eastern Java. Its art and architecture, carried by trade and commerce, influenced expressions of Buddhism that developed across Asia, just as its own culture developed through contact with trading routes originating in the north of the country.

The government’s decision to appropriate this ancient name for a contemporary capital situates the project within a historical narrative of subcontinental pre-eminence and cosmopolitan openness: both traits that they believed the state of Andhra Pradesh, shorn of Hyderabad, needed to reassert. At the capital’s inception, a ubiquitous logo for the development authority included a skyline of towers superimposed onto lotus figure commonly found on balustrades of Amaravathi’s ancient stupa. Placed behind the skyline, the half circle can also be read as the sun on the horizon. This overlapping of historical, diurnal and projective time fixes in place both the past and the future in order to legitimise the capital’s political project. With this superimposition of two distant moments, the space between past and future is collapsed, figuring an instantaneity that leaves little room for an understanding of the site as an ongoing process that stretches both forwards and backwards.

The time that passes in these different still frames undoes the eye from its fixed viewing point, allowing it to wander. There is a work to watching that requires attention and potentially opens toward a relation to the site that is indeterminate, needing to be produced and reproduced in ways that resist an easy implication and that potentially model good relations. For all that the films fail to evoke, what they propose is a method that eschews the analytical stance that habitually drives representation. The drawings, diagrams, photographs and interviews that normatively function to document a site often join up and articulate knowledge in ways that act as a ‘between’. This may indeed be inevitable. But how can we think of these methods in ways that resist the impulse to connect A to B? How is it possible to stay within that ‘in-between’, if only to allow for an opening toward encounter

Before work at Amaravati stopped in the summer of 2019, construction was taking place at nearly every stage of the site’s overall transformation. Certain arteries were completed; others revealed strata of sedimented asphalt, rock, sand and earth. Some had only yet been etched into place, the earth cleared and flattened with brown-black topsoil pushed aside into regular mounds. The stopping and planned restarting (the before and after) of Amaravati’s development speaks to the contingent nature of urban development while also occluding other imaginations of space, time and place. The suspension of that projective arc, despite or perhaps because of that very delay, prevents a recognition that other futures are indeed possible. It also puts into shadow a more direct and sustained attention to what is right there before us: to Land in its full and actual potential.

As AbdouMaliq Simone has noted, it is often the case that certain processes of urbanisation do not cohere with the narratives of development promised by planning efforts such as those at Amaravati. He proposes instead that ‘while dedicated genealogies may be capable of grasping how particular built environments, spatial dispositions, and fabrics got to be the way they manifest themselves, there is something that eludes coherent narratives of development and prospective futures’. That ‘something’ is the space and place of Amaravati in this moment before the resumption of its erstwhile trajectory. While the re-elected government is determined to at once continue along that earlier path, the site as it has been during these years of hiatus comprises disparate, contradictory, overlapping realms that transgress that disciplining narrative. It is the elusiveness of a still-time.