Of Left Over Spaces / Kashi Art Cafe, Kochi

It is evident that the coming of the Biennale has transformed the area of Fort Kochi. One visible change is the way in which the biennale ties together the spaces through an artistic schema. Another important aspect is the release or rather the creation of a public realm in the interstitial space of the home and the street. Numerous independent enterprises, mostly cafes, have come up in the verandahs of houses, run by the house owners themselves. These are generally extensions of the main houses, and thus accommodated in the porches, front yards or backyards. The innovative ways in which people come to inhabit and experience Kochi on one hand, and the utility of a cafeteria on the other is rather unique. I have remained intrigued of the way in which people imagine space to evolve into a new economy.

Another interesting thing is the way in which, in order to cater to such above economies, interstitial spaces - those between buildings get occupied.  Left over spaces like passageways, access routes get transformed into inhabitable areas. But these beautifully detailed and carved out spaces envelop the body rather intimately.  Smaller lean-to roofs create narrow covered spaces, leaving some gap for the light to enter from above, nestling courtyards within. Corners, window thicknesses, niches, plinths, parapets, all enliven the streets, without the need for people. Traces of habitation can make the experience of streets engaging.

(Geraldine Borio has studied such spaces closely in her recent scholarship - drawing from examples in Hongkong).

Below are some examples of ways in which seemingly left over spaces (my favourite is Kashi Art Cafe)

The Production of Ambiguity / 'Provisions' by Raqs Media Collective

published in Art India
Vol. 23 / Issue 1 / Apr 2019

The Production of Ambiguity

Raqs Media Collective’s show invites us to doubt our political and social bearings while revisiting George Orwell’s life, points out Anuj Daga.



The 3D-printed burnt biscuits individually encased and displayed on the French table at the Raqs Media Collective’s show Provisions at Project 88, Mumbai, from the 16th of January to the 9th of March, sharply comment on the French army’s trial accounts of the Paris Communards. The Paris Commune was a short-lived radical socialist and revolutionary government composed of the working class that ruled Paris for two months in 1871. Later, 20,000 of these workers were said to have been imprisoned in ‘hermetically closed’ cattle wagon-like pontoons with no sign of fresh air, thrown upon a heap of biscuits that reduced to crumbs under them. The prisoners in the dungeons ashore survived only on crumbs of biscuits and rancid fat.

In a continual reading, the lenticular prints To Ask When Empty mounted alongside on the wall seem to express the disorientation of those tortured prisoners. However, in a more general sense, the shifting illusory impressions of verb couplings like ‘To Disobey/When Told’ or ‘To Feed/When Hungry’ jeopardize quotidian causality. They invite the mind to flicker in their stereoscopic bracing of everyday tasks. How is eating/feeding and hunger controlled? When does one pour/ask into the empty/full glass? The variable relationships between cause and effect perceived in the lenticular shimmer as we move across space and time induce skepticism and prepare us to dive into a pool of doubt.

Palimpsests of perforated sheets in varied materials talk of toxicity, and ask if, humanity in the spirit of equity, may share contamination too. How does one map the distribution of decay and pollution, disease and contagion? How does pain overlap life-forms, and what kind of possibilities emerge between them? On another wall, a fictitious conversation between workers and robots in a factory canteen leads us into questions about humanity being reconstituted vis-a-vis artificial intelligence. Narrated in ten screen-printed newsprint panels that embody the act and materiality of labour and mass production, the story simultaneously reveals the inner mechanized lives of workers in confrontation with the enlivening agencies of robots. Over a short conversation, the worker and the robot confuse and confound their lives within each other.

These peripheral, seemingly disconnected distractions, finally lead us to the centerpiece of the exhibition – a film travelogue that weaves the artefacts in the show in the life and work of English writer George Orwell. Beginning in Motihari, Bihar, in British India, where he was born in 1903, the film draws context from his self-initiated inquiries into the experiences of working class people, his clever commentaries against social injustice and his ideological belief in democratic socialism. In its hand-held footage, the film becomes a diary written through moving images. Captions excerpted from various works of Orwell and other sources like the Pali canon appear on the screen as margin notes and allow us to remain close to the journey.

As one sits through the film, remaining artworks in the room uncannily begin to reveal themselves as annotative intersections across time and place. Orwell’s biography indexes several concerns regarding class, caste and self-identification manifested within the exhibition. Born to a lower middle class English father who was an Indian civil servant and a mother with French roots, Orwell’s short life kept drifting within the bounds of a transforming colonized territory. His reflective writings like Animal Farm, 1984 or The Road to Wigan Pier referenced in the film provoke the viewers to contemplate the fate of politics and people, and affectively tease out their sense of ideological bearings in contemporary times. Borrowing from Orwell, the artists ask, “Why not cultivate anachronism as a space time hobby?”

The film screen becomes a mirror through which the artefacts in the room biographically reflect each other in space and time. The choice of Orwell as the central subject resonates at several levels. His birthplace emphatically helps the Oriental subject identify with the issues of labour and land; his writings index subversive alternatives to the dominant regimes of capitalism; his travel alerts us to the risks of communist experiments; but most tellingly, Raqs’s own artistic practice invested in thinking through writing and critical journalism refers to Orwell’s. In following Orwell’s life journey, the artists revisit genealogies of several political ideologies and propose provisions.

Provisions takes us on a spatial, historical, literary and political journey and mobilizes the productive force of ambiguity. They claim, “In doubting, you create provisions for many people to participate.” Towards the end, the curatorial character of the exhibition begins to allude to Orwell’s allegorical Animal Farm and the artworks begin to relate to each other within a charged flux of political exchanges.

When does history begin to work itself inside me? What encounters occur within myself?  As I prepared to leave the industrial space of the century-old metal printing press, which is now a gallery, where the artifacts were exhibited, I gave one last glance to the lenticular clock prints titled Sleep Clocks. Are these the objects of industrial time that shape an individual into a worker or a worker into a robot? Do they come to direct further or release me? Inducing a flash of doubt, the hands of the clock moved, and made my world more provisional than before.




Raqs. To Ask When Empty. Installation view. Lenticular. 24” x 12” each. 2018. Image courtesy the artists and Projects 88.

Construction Sites - I

Khoj International Artists' Association, Delhi

Built Environment in South Asia

South Asian Architecture


In our close reconsideration of architectural history in the south Asian subcontinent, we have come to identify a huge lacuna in the availability of coherent content on the built environment in south Asia. Such an issue got articulated through multiple vectors. There is abundant scholarship on the built environment in Europe and Americas that facilitates discourse and dissemination of these landscapes and often becomes easily subsumed into pedagogical processes not only just in the above continents, but also all across the world. To be sure, architecture history students in the remaining part of the world have grown up to be architects only studying content that talks of buildings in other contexts that:

1. Defines the notion of what is “architecture” - in a certain way
2. Instills a certain value system through which built environment is appreciated
3. Desire for transforming their own, immediate landscapes to suit inherited frameworks
4. Aspiration to fit into the dominant discourse of architectural theory, seeking legitimization

Following similar parameters and methods, a number of surveys and books have been produced, often by non-native scholars, for the South Asian sub-continent. While the distance from a certain culture under observation offers critical objectivity, the material output invariably caters to an audience outside its own context and content. Such knowledge also has an alienating tendency for the natives in its consumption, because one is channeled to think through a methodology that may not be one’s own way of reading and understanding one’s context. In the lack of or absence of articulation of one’s own “method” – an epistemological notion that is deeply embedded in tenets of modern scholarship – often these ways of seeing are accepted as default. Nevertheless, my intent is not to devalue such ways of assimilating and making sense of the information around us. Rather, it is important to think, if there indeed is a way outside the ‘rational’ framework of legitimizing the knowledge that rests in different cultures.

Cultural interpretations of built environment and space in different contexts call for a nuanced translation, which in turn necessitate the mobilization of a specific kind of infrastructure. Given their unconsolidated political landscapes, many of the regions have not been able to realize the value in documentation of their architectural pasts, for that matter, in many cases, the preservation of many such places also remain vulnerable. Which aspects of built environment then, do people come to value and how? What aspects of “architecture” in this manner are regarded to be worthy of preservation in different cultures? What does it speak of these societies and their attitude to the material world? And lastly, are these attitudes evident in the architectural remains that are available today, and can they be read and studied?

How does one formulate sensitive methods in order to decipher these traits and attitudes? Where does one begin? How deep in history to go, how do we situate ourselves vis-à-vis history? How do we make sense of something that we haven’t experienced, or isn’t a part of our cultural ethos? How do you locate such a context, historically and geographically? And besides, how does this history inform the contemporary ways in which we assess architecture in different places?

drawing by Priyanshi Bagadia, SEA student

Shouts

They were shouting. We were in class. We ignored the first two noises. The third one, we decided to check out. Prasad was asking students to shout out their lungs. Fellow mates of the first year class had to respond to the earlier shouts, only through a shout. Some hesitated, some laughed, some simply acted. We stood at watched as Prasad kept making students shout. Some, whom he asked to shout again did, while some others couldn't. They expressed they had lost their energy, or that they were too conscious for the second time.

The shouts seemed like the first cries of mankind. Each person shouted in different voices - those that they produced in different capacities, and different depths. The projections of energies was powerful and raw. And the taming of this energy created newer sounds, music and language. But what does it mean for language speaking people to shout? On one hand, it was cathartic, and on the other, it was sheer excitement. Could one shout with complete self awareness? What is the loudest we can be? And how does being loud affect our body and environment?

I remained with the profoundness of this experience. It transformed me to think about language, music and communication.

The Horizon

How far do I need to be from the horizon to see it bent?
How elevated do I need to be to feel the curve of the earth?
For the limits of land are not straight
And the tip of the world I see isn't isolated from the other...

A Hejduk-ian moment in Mumbai