Last week would have been a better time to write this piece. Ashok and Shaina took students of School of Environment & Architecture to three of their ongoing exhibitions in the city. These included "Country of the Sea" at Bhau Daji Lad, "Night for Day" at Chemould Art Gallery (As If IV) and the last one, cleverly titled 'As If tV' at the Clark House Initiative in Colaba. Infact, the one at Bhau Daji Lad, Shaina reminded me this morning, ended today!
Yet, I must revisit CAMP's intervention at Bhau Daji Lad - one of the sharper interventions among the many that have taken place by far at the museum. As we all know, Bhau Daji Lad is the city's oldest museum and houses much archives of the city itself. The exhibits here include some of the early relief maps of Mumbai, the cartographic drawings of the city on sea, showing its development from seven islands to the cotton mills. Within such collection, CAMP's "The Country of the Sea" stands at the edge of the city to look beyond into the sea - a space so close to us, yet seemingly so far. What happens just beyond what we conventionally understand our city's limits? Does it really end there? What is the relationship of land to the sea? What happens at the interface and how does it get articulated? How do we enter into the sea and where after all would the venture take us?
The Country of the Sea walks us into our outside. It provokes the imagination and articulation of a place that lies beyond the boundary that has come to define our "lived" territory. It attempts to look at the sea as a place in itself, with its own ways of working and dealing with its issues. The different works bring forth much that is otherwise not visible - the sea farers and their lives, the goods that are transported across countries, the trade activities on docks and what goes within cargo containers and customs. Within such works emerges a cultural ecology of the sea.
Typically water bodies as large as seas are seen as those that divide land masses, more recently, that which separates countries and cultures. Nevertheless, as Shaina mentioned,
The Country of the Sea looks as the boat as the medium, the carrier - the
vaahan. It looks at how the sea facilitates the communication of a host of activities between the otherwise separated lands / cultures. It is a place through which objects of all shapes, sizes and functions are traded to countries across - from chyawanprash, to cars to even petrol pumps! Who takes these goods across the seas? How is all this done? What is the biography of the sea?
The film Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, one of the first encounters within the museum space introduces us to this landscape of sea farers. It documents different activities happening across the docks of different countries ranging from Gujarat, moving up to Karachi, Arabian Gulf, Persian Gulf and coming down finally to African coast. It shows the ship making pans, the docks and the ports where one already begins to see how the cultures have traveled along with the goods. People from different cultures appear to be in different geographies, much like the goods that travel from one place to the other. A lot of these people spend much of their lives on the sea, away from their homes. The sea is their home, the ship is their place.
Sea farers move within the water with few rules. They talk to passing boats using their own satellite phones, they navigate using GPS techniques (much evolved from earlier counter parts like cartographic maps). Goods and things are exchanged without laws, routes are defined yet undefined. Many of these sailors may not have visited Mumbai as much as they frequent to Dubai or Sharjah! For example, Ashok mentioned that many Gujarati sailors end up spending more time over a year in Dubai than perhaps their own homeland. Children of the edge, right from a young age, live and play on water. The sea is forever a part of their growing up, blurring the separation between land and water. It is this "place" that gets defined in the work of CAMP.
The large cinema screen introducing us to the intervention sits in the atrium of Bhau Daji Lad, transforming the whole space into a cinema hall. Elaborate stepped seating, introduction of sound and dimming the lights help this transition. Not only were the artificial lights illuminating the exhibits were controlled or put off, the excessive daylight leaking into the museum through its large lower floor and clerestory windows were also blocked off using six layers of fine nets. This finally created a workable condition of the projection of the film onto the screen suspended from a 20 feet long steel rail put across the first floor.
As Ashok briefed, the introduction of the film brings in a moving element in the museum space which otherwise houses only static objects. It also brings sound into the space changing the experience of displayed objects themselves. The intervention turns the museum into a dual cinema of sorts in its tweaked structure of viewing. In the first case, it brings to rest the mobile viewer who moves into the museum to look at the displayed objects, making the exhibit (here, the film) moving. This film takes the person into a different geography / (ies). In the second case, the soundscape in which the viewers move to see the existing objects that have themselves come from different geographies create a space of its own within the minds of the onlookers. This duality operates subconsciously, and much indirectly. The introduction of sound and moving image hints at the possibilities of re-conceptualizing the idea of viewership within a museum.
The setting of the intervention turns David Sassoon into an onlooker. A poetry emerges when the maker of the city stares the cinema screen, into the trade and exchange that happens across the sea, essentially the activity that characterizes cities. The upper floor of the museum turns into a balcony when passers by rest onto the handrail, gazing into the screen. The soft murmur of the sea and boat give new meaning to the reading of maps within the museum.
Another exhibit along the journey is 'The Country of the Blind' that brings to us footage of what the coastguards see through their long distance telescopes across the Copt Point in Folkstone. The film takes us into the unseen places and how the officers who man the coast look at these activities. After this, we move to 'Gujarat & the Sea' - a playful take on an exhibition that spoke about the maritime history of Gujarat. CAMP describes the political underpinnings of the work more succinctly
here. The crafting of the frames was all done inhouse in the studio. The iconography of the photo frames exaggerate the fact that the images have been "cropped" from an earlier exhibition. The fact that they have been edited has been made loud and explicit in the four-corner black-mark frames. They have been re-annotated by CAMP challenging, playing and pushing for alternative history of the place. The center of the room has a series of miniature paper boats with the names of actual ones that carry goods across the seas.
The next room has a magnanimous map - one that gives a geography to the primary work and title of the exhibition. The story of the making of the map needs to be recorded, for it is an act of bravery, boldness and ambition. The brief for this map was weird. Ashok wanted to create a non-map, essentially because he did not quite believe in conventional cartographic maps. The map had to situate the argument of the show, which was difficult to articulate. All one did know that it was to be big, to suit the scale of the space it indexed, and that in which it would eventually be displayed.
In order to make a beginning, Ashok had managed to download a map of the coastline of the world from the internet (I am already forgetting where we got it from). This was an extremely detailed map which showed each millimetre of indentation on the coast. Viewing the map wasn't possible until Ashok cracked a way to download an Autocad format file. Once done, I was able to access and edit it using AutoCAD. Our task was to make an open piece of coastline into a readable territory. This meant the rationalization of the extremely detailed map, and tweaking it to come together as a whole.
To begin with, we had several references to draw from the past for imagining our own map. Firstly, we wanted to refer to the evolutionary territorial connection between the Indian and African continental plates. It has been well proven looking at the shapes and ecosystems along the coasts of the continents that they once shared a relation, even were a single mass. This jigsaw fitting had to be reminisced. Secondly, the Gujarati sailors had their own version of the sea map for their own trading activities. This was in the form of a long scroll, where routes between different places across the sea were marked. The map was not cartographic, rather notional. It treated the sea as a medium full with gujarati annotations and information. The resulting map thus, had to evoke this history notionally, yet demarcate and establish the Country of the Sea.
We worked on the map for two weeks carefully removing excess information. It went through a series of simplification versions. Since working on the computer screen, the scale of the output was hard to visualize. We then switched on a grid in the software to be able to get hold of the largeness of detail. It appeared that even in a square of 2 x 2 mm, there were details worth kilometres huge. Those details had to be straightened and ignored for the purpose of printing. Over three days, I kept working and reworking on the map to make it leaner. Finally, Ashok extracted a command from the internet on reducing the complexity of a polyline on autocad. This was absolutely new for me, for it involved the installation of a command that could be plugged in onto AutoCAD. Once done, we took some time to understand the command itself because it had several parameters. We did some experiments and found that the command while useful to some extent, wouldn't help us right till the end. It changed the character of the map we intended to make. Eventually, we used a combination of manually retracing the map along with this new found command.
Originally we aimed to laser cut this large map in steel, ofcourse after discussing a range of materials like acrylic, wood, mdf, aluminium and so on. The discussion took place with artists from Clark House. Industrial cutters of steel or wood gave up to the scale of the project. It was far too detailed to even get a sample, since their machines could not, in the first place, process the complex drawing! Amidst all this, we had taken two large print outs of the map on paper to visualize its largeness and complexity. In the discussion with Clark House artists came up the mention of cyanotype printing. Cyanotype printing is similar to the blue print quality that architects have been using for long. While no one knew the process, we googled it to understand the basics. The next day, Clark House came with their multiple experiments on cloth, paper, and what not. They had hunted the market for the chemicals, mixed them in their own studios and performed a series of iterations of how the process behaves under different material conditions. After a lot of deliberation and tests, we decided to go ahead with getting a cyanotype print on cloth.
The maximum size of one piece cloth that was available to us was 6 feet wide and about 18 feet long. From the initial ambition of a larger artwork, we had to shrink it to the market availability of material. Following the nature of our work, and from his past experience, Ashok had right from the beginning asked Rupali (Patil) to get two sets of cloths and chemicals. Accordingly, Rupali had gotten two pieces of these huge cloths. In the mean while, Ashok and I were working our way towards making the final cut of the map ready. We had to create a mask out of it such that it could help in getting the inverse as the exposed cyanotype print on exposure to sun.
Going through the throusands of kilometers of coastline along with Ashok was quite an experience. While Ashok panned google earth locating his memories of many ports he had visited or known of over the five (or more) years of his research, I kept marking them on my abstract Autocad outline which was already tweaked. It was amazing to see Ashok remembering qualities and characteristics of several ports. Many of these, he had only researched through secondary sources. Missing any of these on our map - a required move given the scale of the map - made him guilty. In the end, we had to sacrifice a lot of smaller ports along the large coastline, some even as less as a single jetty.
Finally we identified and decided to keep about 80 to 100 ports that could define the outline of the Country of the Sea. The map began to look like a monster, a dinosaur of sorts. The shape of the map seemed to suggest as if the sea was a river, a conduit of cultural exchange enlivened by the numerous activities of sea trade. Seemingly distant places came closer, refreshingly bringing new relationships. We finally took this outline to photoshop which wasn't able to handle the size of the graphic. Ashok figured a way to make it smaller such that the mask could be prepared.
On the other hand, the cloth for the print was to be washed and made free of any starch, such that it could soak the chemical well. We needed a very large bucket that could take this size of cloth. After thinking much, Shaina helped the Clark house guys with Ananda's (her son's) bath tub! The cloth was soaked and washed thus, and made ready for printing.
The printout of the mask was brought to CAMP studio by Clark House artists by the evening. Everyone sat around and stared at the largeness of the work which was still about the complete. The plan was to coat the large cloth with the appropriate chemicals overnight, such that they are not exposed. The work was to be exposed to sunlight for exactly 15 minutes, when the chemical would react with light to turn blue. After 15 minutes it was to be washed off all its excess chemical which would otherwise turn blue too, and ruin the work. Things went according to plan, and CAMP's terrace was much helpful! The artists were able to spread the work in the large space.
The cyanotype map emerged brilliantly. It was to be washed now and then ironed to be installed onto the final frame. To remove any trace of the chemical from the work from further exposing, some of them thought of using detergent powder. As they applied the detergent, a reaction with the chemical took place, and spoiled the entire graphic. It was a disaster. We decided to work again.
In this situation, Ashok's wisdom of getting two cloth pieces became clear to me. Ashok summoned me to get a new print out for masking the cloth for exposure, while the Clark house guys began to prepare for the second exposure. The day was frantic! The guys hadn't slept the night before and terribly tired. Still, the show had to go on, because there were only two days to go for the exhibition opening. The unfortunate part was that there was no water in the tank that day - someone forgot to turn the water valve on! There was thus no water to either wash the cloth before, or the chemical after! After much beg, borrow and steal, Ashok barged onto the neighbour's tank and got water! It was a crazy night! Finally, the print process was repeated. This time people were more careful. The sun showed, and the print was out! This is the story of this map, as huge as itself.
After sharing its story, I am too tired to talk of the dialogues it opens. It is a fantastic object, and has a history of its own! In Ashok's words, it looks "weird", something he would like. It underpins a lot of historical and artistic references. It is the blue print of the Country of the Sea, a river of exchange, a puzzle of lands and the scaled to the sailors reference or the scroll map. In is display, the map is seen across cruciform photographs which hang from the ceiling within the room. These are arranged in the form of the Thurrayya, a star constellation which helps sailors position their way when sailing. The cruciforms have photographs from the activities of this geography.
We pass to the last room on the floor thorough a radio project set up by CAMP in Sharjah. It's a short video. The last room consists of a printer held high up in the air which prints a list of goods every half hour. It accumulates these lists within the room over the day. The project references the numerous records that the artists archived from Sharjah. These are innumerous records of objects that have changed lands and boundaries, that have been compiled into a publication by the artists.
One of the last works that we encounter is a set of four screens in a room on the lower floor that reveals the loading and unloading that happens in cargo containers. The videos allow us to peek into what happens within the boundaries of customs, etc. The installation of this work went through a lot of reconsideration right from the beginning - from its place within the narrative of the show to the display strategy with respect to the different screen sizes that were borrowed from different art galleries across the city. The final layout of the screens tackles the constraints very well.
I have tried to record the journey of the making of the Country of the Sea. It is hardly a review of the exhibition, for it doesnot talk about the concerns that the artists would have liked to perhaps talk about. As mentioned before, my documentation here attempts to talk of what goes on behind making art, taking challenges, and affording risks. In this manner, the process demonstrates the title of the series - As If. The exhibition has been put together quite bravely in its scale, intent and content, as discussed. Sometimes however, the overpowering scale might puzzle you in the resultant blandness of the art works. However, more accurately, it is just asking you to recalibrate the proximity with which you see them, or the subject at large.
