“Hi, can I join you?” “It depends what your intentions are.” Karthik Pandian’s மனசு (manasu) offers a sprawling, riverine account of relationship-building and bridging distance. The film restages the artist’s first meeting with American Indian Movement activist Mike Forcia at an encampment for unhoused Native people in Minneapolis, MN in 2021. Using re-enactment and outtakes to recount that fateful encounter, the film chronicles the pair’s subsequent collaborations which encompass the larger Forsythia cycle: public performance, music, ceremony, and artmaking.

In Pandian’s ancestral South Indian language of Tamil, மனசு (manasu) means both “heart” and “mind.” The film seeks to repair this connection sundered by the English language, Enlightenment, and colonialism, alighting along the way on additional couplings: murky translations, confluences of rivers, and kinship found in shared “Indian-ness” across Turtle Island and South Asia, to offer ways of working together in difference. In Pandian’s work, difference can be seen as a source of strength with the potential to animate movements—here seen through the laughter, discomfort, and earnest connection necessary to truly move together.

Pandian’s Forsythia cycle is a multifaceted project which originated in the 2020 uprising in Minneapolis and activists’ toppling of Minnesota’s monument to Christopher Columbus. The project is rooted in long-term collaboration to address colonization, translation, responsibility, and accountability. Encompassing film, performance, and installation, the Forsythia cycle seeks to cultivate the relations necessary to imagine a survivable future, and new ways of imagining culture in exile, diaspora, and settler colonial contexts.