This paper offers a preliminary exploration of mise en scene framings in two different moving image practices, located in two different coastlines of the Indian sub-continent. As a heuristic exercise, I will explore how these vastly different engagements with media formats reconfigures the relationship between sound and image. Set in a beach side village in the Kanyakumari district towards the southern tip of Tamil Nadu, Swarnavel Pillai’s feature length film, Kattumaran (2019), offers a reckoning of the breadth of relationships between the sea and the village in the aftermath of the Tsunami of 2004 that levelled the fishing community on land. In a narrative that calls on tropes of melodrama, Pillai revises the heteronormative genre by tying it to class and caste differences, which in turn, sharpen the focus on figurations of the elemental—the roar of sea and the movement of the waves.Far from the Coromandel and on the other coast of the Deccan stands the city of Mumbai, an area expanded through reclamation. As a posting, the city has become a rich source of installation and media art, which have been attentive to its precarious relationship to the sea; SOAK (2008) is distinctive as one the most thoughtful site-specific interventions between environmental design and art installation. In this rich range of practices, I will be attuning to media artist Anuj Vaidya’s ongoing podcast, Zombie Development (2021-present), to offer a riposte to the logic of visual representational practices. Eschewing the vector of picturization, Anuj Vaidya’s sound art draws attention to the precarity of the Warli people living in the heart of the city’s ordained large forest. Collapsing the difference between podcast and installation in the white cube, Vaidya’s experimental, speculative, and documentary scenarios reimagine a world outside the logics of land grab and dispossession. In their three podcasts towards speculative futures, Vaidya recasts the ecology of activism in the city.

This presentation is a wager that incommensurability between practices offers a study in contrasts, which in turn is a way of considering how locations generate distinctive media practices—feature film and experimental media art for different coastlines.