Poulomi Basu: Centralia

From Assembly:

“Poulomi Basu’s award-winning series Centralia (2010-2020) draws us in with lyrical images of mysterious landscapes and figures. We are quickly denied, however, the access and understanding that we often expect from photography—especially photography that at first glance seems to use the language of the documentary. This is Basu’s intention, as she crafts a narrative of “docu-fiction,” transforming the story of a decades-long and virtually unknown guerrilla war in Central India into an ambiguous narrative that unsettles our understanding of truth, media, violence, feminism, and environmentalism.

Basu layers multiple conflicts, landscapes, and actors within this body of work in order to dislocate the images from any real place or time. Centralia captures the struggle between forest-dwelling indigenous populations in the Indian states of Chhattisgarh, Odisha, and West Bengal, where the coveted mineral deposits of iron ore, bauxite, and coal are mined and exploited by outside forces, including the Indian government. The displaced tribal population has responded and rebelled since the 1960s by organizing as Maoist revolutionaries called Naxalites.

The series takes its title, however, from a now-abandoned former mining town in Pennsylvania that was forcibly evacuated in the early 1990s, after a subterranean fire released toxic gasses and created sinkholes over the course of several decades. For Basu, Centralia’s story speaks to—and perhaps prefigures—the destructive toll of resource extraction on the land and its inhabitants in India and other areas of the global south.

Basu counters assumptions of warfare by infusing color, femininity, and ambivalence into this contested landscape: “The conflict, with its many actors all occupying opaque roles, has created a space with its own internal logic and landscape.” Far from cohesive or resolved, Centralia asks us to wander between places and times—both pictured and not pictured—in order to draw our own conclusions about photography and knowledge, right and wrong, reality and fiction. “