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A collection of cassette tapes thrifted in Los Angeles became the inspiration for Bharat Sikka's A Set of Tapes. The publication unfolds as Side A and Side B, corresponding to two journeys made months apart. The first follows Sikka as he accompanies his daughter to Los Angeles to begin film school, introducing her to America through the shared rituals of the road trip. The second retraces that journey upon returning to bring her home after her first semester. Instead of a linear narrative, the book establishes a rhythm of departure and return, allowing distance, repetition and duration to become the work's primary subjects.
After completing the phototgraphs, Sikka dismantled the cassette tapes themselves—unspooling their magnetic ribbon to be incorporated throughout as a series of interventions that traverse photographs and blank pages alike: a line, a gesture and a connective thread that interrupts the sequence while simultaneously holding it together. At times it resembles a road, at others a horizon, a drawing or an edit, quietly insisting on the physical construction of memory.
Despite our memory of mixtapes and the mythology of the American road trip, here the cassette is neither nostalgic nor symbolic. It is transformed into a material index of passage, binding image, object and publication into a single sequence. The work proposes that photographs do not simply preserve experience; they acquire meaning through the structures that connect them, and through the geographical, temporal and emotional landscapes they continue to traverse.