Tania Candiani

Vimana Tale is a scale model of a Vimana sculpture that was taken from the Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts to “levitate” around the city’s landscapes, as well as through tea plantations and bamboo forests. Its documentation became an illustrated story and a video.

Vimana Tale uses traditional Taiwanese flying lanterns technology to recreate an Indian mythological phenomenon based on the “Vaimanika Shastra” about Vimanas or “aeronautical science”, a text of the early twentieth century on aerospace technology.

The literary descriptions, and mostly the drawing of this text, were used as a reference in the construction of this scale model manufactured by a Taiwanese craftsman. In the video piece, the camera carefully accompanies the Vimana flying through different landscapes, creating the narrative of an ancient legend.