Golden Jubilee: An interview with Suneil Sanzgiri
Aamna Muzaffar: Golden Jubilee is the most recent in a set of three films you’ve made since 2019; to start off, can you tell me about the way these works are situated within your practice and, thinking about the arc of this triad, what brought these stories together for you?
Suneil Sanzgiri: This series of works really began with one image, or rather screenbased experience, which actually opens up the first film in the trilogy called At Home But Not At Home (2019). I had grown quite homesick for a place I had never even been to yet—Goa—but with which I have an ancestral connection. My uncles, aunties, and cousins who live there would often say to me, “You belong to Goa”—the first time I had heard those words, “you belong.”
The primary image that you see at the beginning of the first film is of me navigating these strange 360-degree panoramic views of Goa in Google Maps, where bodies, faces, landscapes, vehicles, books, and the soil itself all become sutured together in this huddled mass. It’s almost grotesque but somehow articulated something that I hadn’t yet been able to find the vocabulary for. What I realized was that the image I was seeing was the camera’s inability to make sense of itself. It’s what happened when the camera, pointed at itself, attempted to hide, flee—creating an approximation of something “whole” out of disparate parts. This composite, combined with an excerpt from a Stuart Hall interview that I used as the audio in the opening scene, introduces questions around gaps, voids, and fragments within concepts of diaspora.
Essentially, these films collectively explore how screen-based technologies and circulations of image production affect our understanding of what it means to belong to a people. And my
