Chapter 1: Of Rock and Apricot and Mountaintop is the residue of a collaborative storytelling project between rural communities in India and two urban artists – the photographer and dancer Shivani Gupta and writer and folk musician Corinne Elysse Adams.
Chronicling the people of Dha and Hanu villages, small settlements high in the Himalayan mountains of Ladakh, Shivani Gupta and Corinne Adams encouraged the local people to share their ancient and present folklore. Ladakh is a region rich in storytelling, and many people remember sitting huddled around the stove on long, cold winter evenings intently listening to master storytellers regale them night after night. Participating in similar processes, the artists collected tales animated by witches, elusive love, and mountains with souls.
Reaching beyond the spoken word, Adams and Gupta engaged in theatrical performances of the collected stories, working with the narrators themselves to take on the roles of the protagonists in these mythical tales. Adorning themselves in traditional robes along with fantastical creations made using found objects, from plastic waste to flowers, the storytellers are seen playing out the characters from their stories, using their own landscape as a stage.
In this series, Gupta contemplates how traditional communities explore their history and translates this visually into her work, which is rooted firmly in the present. Thread Whispers investigates how we weave together the shreds of memory, historical fact, and imaginative reconstruction in pursuit of a fantastical realism amongst the ordinary.
Tashi Palmo, won’t you tell us a story? “ Stay with me and I will tell you a story for every night.”
This is the Garden at the edge of the world.
Dah, This is the story of how the arrow landed in paradise.
I wondered if one star may pull another from its place in the sky, and now I know it’s more like being an arrow loosed from a bright bow, sent burning through the dark. In a long shot, the target a ower affixed to a poplar tree, everything pinned to that one wild rose.
In the sunlight Gyaltson came back to me: hat of owers and dyed wool crow-hair and eyes that give back light in blues and greens, like the sky and the grass re ected in the stream.
Palmo, “ But I am not without my own magics, smoke and spirits murmur I left my ring, silver and turquoise to quiet the earth
But it couldn’t stop the curse.
Gunn Nu Sholo, The Moon’s story
It was the voices of a pair of crow brothers which woke me, watched me from the branches with dark, serious eyes, they catechized and jeered, teasing me for my silence.
Sandalwood against the still lake lit with sunbeams through the rain, charm for a second life.
We wandered a long time, wore our feet hard and dark. rough sharp orange-berried seabuckthorn and spiny plants, until we came into a eld of owers, green and alive with wild mint, grapes, apricot trees. It was like our garden, but untame.I took my husband’s hand, and we walked long through the whispering leaves, breathing the owers and tasting the fruits, until we were full of their life.
She was of nondesrcript age, with hair that hung to her waist and seemed to swallow any little light that shone from the hut. The woman smiled, or maybe the shadows around her month shifted.
Dreams of Palmo kept him up all night.
The sky seemed to have swelled and ruptured a gush of stars,
cold and sharp as the steel of the knife Norzang clenched
in curled fingers.
La-e-Lhamo—
winged spirits
not from this world
of rock and apricot and mountaintop.
The holy men gathered amidst the heavy apricot trees, and the lhamo had no thought for them, had seen a hundred like them
But there was one, one with the glow
like an apricot or the sun—
Goddesses whispered his name
Have you seen my love?
The man asks the spirit in the rock.
He is holy but it does not change the rock’s silence.