Rebellions begin in the margins of existence.

Margins are the sites of bewilderment, the extremities of a body. They are the degree of an error, the arenas of confrontations before peace. Margins are the contours of shifting boundaries that chart geographies of inclusion and exclusion within the circumstance of our lives. They are resting places, where meaning is in momentary abeyance and the churn of the living can be glimpsed.

The works of Mir Umar Hassan are meant to be read only in such margins.
They are prescription against completion. Rants against certitude.

And when the order of things starts to become unbearably resolute, when a nation becomes content in the identity it has chosen for itself, when the people of a country calcify their boundary of time - it is to such notes in the margins of history that we must look - to rediscover visions of an incoherent and benevolent future.


We released a small new game from the Somewhere anthology last month.
It is called : The Indifferent Wonder of an Edible Place. And it is a game about a municipal building eater, consuming the last tower in a town that has been willfully erased.

Originally created as an installation for an exhibition at Phoenix Leicester, and later displayed at the Video Game Art gallery in Chicago, the game was written in response to my government colonizing its own people.

It is a quiet protest against the vile actions of a state that is attempting to curate for itself a republic as willing to forget uncomfortable truths as it is to defend unfortunate lies.

Places and people in my country, who dare to reject the narrative and rule of the majority, have now become embattled sites of perpetual conflict. Where the mere act of believing in and espousing the possibility of a plural & inclusive record of our lives has become a form of rebellion. A rebellion moreover that is conducted amidst grave violence perpetrated against fragile bodies and fragile communities. And the Indifferent Wonder of an Edible Place attempts to ponder the profound grief of having to survive at the margins of such despotism.

Built as a protest against a meager and unilateral writing of the history of our times,
Edible Places, much like Under a Porcelain Sun, is adapted from the works of the Gujarati poet, Mir UmarHassan. And amidst such turmoil we though we might revisit where these munificent writings by the Gujarati author originate from.


In 1960 when the state of Bombay split like an egg on the jagged edge of the Western Ghats and formed the territories of Gujarat and Maharashtra, the town of Matsyapura was abandoned by government decree - to make it easier to draw a clean border between the new states.

The people of Matsyapur fled their city which had suddenly ceased to exist. Leaving behind crystal mosques, and embroidered streets, an empty teak-wood palace and thin narrow houses of ash. Maqbaras and paper turrets, cavernous cupboards containing the darkness of the night and trunks full of silk and gold. Desolate Step-wells and schools, karkhanas and pan-gullas, sand Bazaars and Libraries.

All tongas and gadis halted forever at the corners of its streets, as if suddenly alert to how unmoving an eternity is. The drains dribbled to a stop. The railway station was shuttered and roads that once lead to the town, now bent away in revulsion.

Imbricated within these obsolescent structures - Mir UmarHassan the fabled Gujarati poet and diarist - found the work of a lifetime!

From the anonymity that Matsyapur had been relegated to, Mir UmarHassan compiled a remarkable record of the kings and heroes and demons who had coaxed the town into existence.
A record of astronomic delineations that fixed it to the earth, and of its various pasts and its various histories. He concocted a scattered but incredible record of the lives of its denizens and the creation of its monuments. The naming of its streets, the momentous crimes of its courts. The palaces, the intrigues, the rivers, the floods, the crematoriums - all this he rebuilt in his fiction in an attempt to resurrect Matsyapur.

But so vast was the project and so intricate the fiction that it was never completed. It could never be completed. It was as if Matsyapur demanded a sacrifice of meaning before revealing itself to the author.
No coherent history of Matsyapur was ever written, no comprehensible story every narrated from that mound of rubble which UmarHassan kept trying to reassemble into a recognisable shape.

All that emerged from his struggle with the city, were shards of text. Thin, sharp and incomplete stories that punctured the history of a newfound nation.

It is these shards of stories that we are attempting to assemble into some form of hypertextual coherence with our work. It is these stories that will become the search for the mythical city of Kayamgadh in Under a Porcelain Sun or recollect the Telephone mines in In The Pause Between the Ringing, or become an endless book in Timruk.

Perhaps it is a project as foolish as the one Mir UmarHassan once embarked upon, an attempt to bring meaning to violence, an attempt to inscribe order upon the history of a land so entangled in memory that time itself has ceased to flow.

But we, perhaps with the privilege of being able to look across a span of history hitherto unavailable to anyone else, have an advantage Mir UmarHassan never enjoyed - for unlike the fabled Gujarati author, we actually exist.

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And we have some wonderful news to share. We have been nominated for the Humble New Talent Award at the AMAZE Festival this year, for our work on project Somewhere. Which includes our previous games, like : In the Pause Between the Ringing, A Museum of Dubious Splendors, and Timruk.

The Indifferent Wonder of Edible Places, will also be displayed at the : Now Play This Festival at the Somerset House, London from April 3 - 5.

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Thank you so much for following and supporting our work.

Studio Oleomingus.