Elephant in the room

Elephant in the room is a video project produced in February 2019 during the Guwahati Research Program- an artist residence program curated by Microclima in Assam, north-east of India.
The video, shot inside Dudul Chowdhuri’s house in Guwahati, involves the owner himself eating a meal together with one of the elephants living in his property. Her name is Monimala and she is a 26 years old female elephant.
The Elephant in the room is an expression commonly used in the anglo-saxon countries that refers to the image of a group of people having conversations in a living room and being indifferent to the surprising presence of an elephant. This expression reports an evident criticality that anyone wants to discuss. In order to distance oneself from pain, frustration and unease each person refuses, more or less consciously, to give substance to a fact and to recognise the proven validity of a statement. On a social level, this attitude may pertain an entire community and it is adopted at the presence of social taboos, embarrassing situations or specific social and political issues.
The decontextualized presence of the female elephant sharing a meal with Dudul in the living room is evidently in contrast with the metaphoric expression that epitomises an ignored or minimized truth, even though it is unquestionably cumbersome. In the video, instead, the elephant’s existence is emphasized by the attention put on it. The man-made environment of the living room appears as one very bio-diverse in which the extraordinary joint presence of these two subjects lies in their natural and everyday connection.