Last month

I have not been able to record quite a lot of things that have been going on in the last two months. I was invited by my friend Nisha Nair to host/conduct the book opening of her very first curatorial project 'People Called Mumbai'. The event took place at the Hive in Bandra - a fascinating labrynthine building that creates cells for working and different cultural activities. I wasn't able to document the place extensively, but I will probably go there again to capture it.

Before all that, I was busy putting up an exhibition at SEA for the advisory meeting that happened on Jan 9th. I also intended to bring out our first newsletter then, however, it will only be released now after the student works have been put in - those that were displayed in the exhibition. The newsletter also underwent some revisions and scrutiny.

The next week after the exhibtion, we went for a study trip to Dahanu for a week. We spent considerable time with Design Jatra that includes Pratik Dhanmer, Shardul Patil, Mayukh Gosavi and Anuradha Wakade. We also met Rima, a third year intern from Academy of Architecture who is currently assisting the practice. I enjoyed all of their enthusiasm, passion and command over their subject of traditional building practices in Murbad and its engagement with natural landscape.

Right after my return from the study tour, I flew off to Delhi for putting up CAMP's exhibition; after which I have been in Bombay compiling the study tour work with students at school. At the same time, I have gotten busy with CAMP's next exhibition that will but put up at Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Byculla. The different geographies I have cut in this short span of time need detailed posts, those that get formulated in the head, but I have not been able to put things down on the blog only due to the lack of committed time.

For example, setting up the exhibition at Jorbagh in Delhi deserves some attention, for I got to experience a many eccentricities of art and artists. Covering up a whole building in a single mask, chopping off windows from walls, drilling into beams and columns, hanging objects from ceilings, removing windows - all was done to make the space suited for the planned exhibit. Further, installing the exhibits and the way they come together in the chaos of the space was even exciting. I want to recount these events in detail.

While at Delhi, I got the opportunity to meet people like Jeebesh Bagchi, Ashish Rajyadhyaksha, and some others of whom I have heard of being prominent in the contemporary cultural scene in India. At the same time, I got introduced to Amol Patil and Poonam Jain from the Clark House Initiative (artist group in Mumbai) with whom we did some parts of the CAMP installations in Jorbagh. Poonam and Amol were in Delhi for putting up their own art shows at the Japan Foundation. They happily came to help CAMP after finishing their work at the foundation. Both, Amol and Poonam studied at Rachana Sansad, and that immediately opened up a common circle of people we knew. Further, we found out that we live in the same neighbourhood in Mumbai! We connected quickly. After my return, I got to meet the entire team of Clark House for a collaborative project that will be executed at the Bhau Daji Lad museum.

I may not be able to write on all of these different engagements in detail - since it all depends on the moods of the author and the space I am in, and also because then the time for reading or thinking about it will be gone. But I must certainly record some instances that gave me satisfaction, pleasure and added to my knowledge of understanding the world. Details will come subsequently.

Watercolour

A4
watercolour
Anuj Daga.

Khoj, Delhi

I was in Delhi in the last week with CAMP for setting up our exhibition "As If - II: The flight of the Black Boxes" in Jorbagh. While there, I was put up at Khoj, an artist residency in Khrikee - a place that I have been to long ago as a part of the research 'Cultural spaces in India' initiated by the Goethe Institute in 2010. Then, Khoj was small bungalow with beautiful spaces and a central little courtyard. Now, it seems that Khoj has acquired some more adjoining property and enlarged its facility to include formal spaces for different activities. There are rooms for resident national or international artists, a library, cafe and other staff quarters - all organized around a courtyard. The space still is charming, although not as colourful as it was before...

CAMP began as an offshoot of Khoj when it wanted to extend its roots to Mumbai. However, CAMP went on to be an independent studio with Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran ofcourse with its "background member" Sanjay Bhangar. Our brief stay in Delhi was thus hosted by Khoj in the background of this association. 

While Khoj was inactive when I went there this time - with its library closed, its director traveling, with no artists yet in, working on any project as well as the terrible weather due to which the place looked cold and grey; it certainly seemed quite appealing to me in its silence. The place has many different spaces that are funded by established artists in India, as well as some international grants. I wasn't able to interact with any one there so I am not sure about the presence of this place in Khirkee. However, of the little I know, Khoj anchors the neighbourhood in its place.

The building is visually boxed into an empty steel framework, parts of which are visible at its entrance. The little offset of the building within its plot passages into the main studios, but is converted into an information cubicle where events happenings and brochures of exhibitions are kept for pick up. Once inside, the building frames its surrounds through the metal frames and window cuts. Right opposite to Khoj is a dilapidated building - a ruin which has remained in the derelict state for about five years, Ashok mentioned. The five floor building is peeled off its walls, and has large holes on its floors. As an architect, it was fascinating to see the building in section, literally. Further, as an artist, it reminded me of Matta Clark's violent artistic acts of chopping full scale buildings. 

Inside, Khoj is hollowed into a staggering courtyard from where one gets the anatomy of the entire place. One can see the studio spaces, staircases and bridges as well as the staff quarters in the far upper corner of this box. This interior space is entirely white washed bricks. The tree within the courtyard is cute, romantic, but scales the space well. 

I am sure that each corner of Khoj creatively activates through the imagination of the artists it hosts. The culmination of the building into the terrace gives a breathtaking view of the ruin that faces it. The surprise of destruction, the forced voyeurism invited by the handicapped building, the poetic incompleteness, its political situatedness in its context and the dramatic way in which Khoj reveals the building in the end makes it truly an artistic discovery. The terrace, borrowing its partial background from the adjoining naked brick building facade is thus a viewing deck exposing to us the world it sits in.

Yet, In Search of Academic Space

In a recent meeting with the academic council at SEA, Prasad Shetty pointed out that while there are already many schools (of architecture) in our city, there is hardly any academic space. His observation particularly resonated with thoughts I shared in my essay 'In Search of Academic Space' before leaving for my masters' studies contributed for Rachana Sansad's magazine. In this same week, one of my cousins shared an article titled "Mumbai's crime is its intellectual death" by Aakar Patel. Of most things that I disagreed in the reading, I found myself ambiguously convinced about the claim of the title. In parallel, at the studio CAMP (run by artists Ashok Sukumaran and Shaina Anand) whom I am presently assisting, Ashok too pointed out the lack of people in the city whom one could have a cultural discourse with. These recurring speculations on the feeble cultural space for discourse and discussion in a thriving cosmopolitan city like Mumbai made me wonder if there really is, a lack of space for dialogue here as compared to other places?

I wonder upon the claim of the city's intellectual death (or let's say the meager existence of cultural space) in light of the fact that every other year, we witness umpteen schools opening up, new courses designed for all kinds of people - working, traveling, migrating, students, adults; new centers for art and design and so on. This would certainly mean that a significant amount of population is being mobilized in the industry of teaching. Would teaching not mean to engage in a discourse? And would it not mean that we would have a good amount of 'thinking' population. However from the speculations mentioned earlier, the intellectuals of the city don't seem to think so. 

Well, to consider that the population enrolled for teaching is 'thinking' may require some closer examination. Without a good survey, one would not be able to articulate any well rounded opinion. But what it certainly demands us to ponder upon is several aspects about 'teaching' and 'thinking' - what is the relationship between 'teaching' and 'thinking'? What differentiates the two, and how do they support each other? What does it mean to teach versus think? Finally, how does it create its own space, rather how should/can these practices carve a space for themselves? Subsequently, why is it important to have such a space and why has the city of Mumbai, after all, failed to sustain a space of discourse?

Prasad has shared an example on several occasions on the above dilemma. He says, "When a tree grows, one can understand it in many ways. One can be interested purely in what you put in and what you get out of the tree. That is, the amount of water, manure, fertilizers you put into nurturing the tree and what it produces in the form of product, as fruits, leaves, lumber, etc, (that can be sold in the market). The second way of looking at the tree is a list of 'how-s' under different conditions. For example, how does a tree behave, change, evolve, adapt or respond to the changing conditions of weather, watering, providing fertilizers, labouring and nurturing."

An academic or academia in general, he hints, must be about the latter way of looking at the object under scrutiny. While the first way of looking easily becomes an instrument of the market, or the capitalistic society in the current economic system, the second method sensitizes one to the dynamics of operation and helps intervening into it. Rather than simply consuming the norms laid by the system, one has to be able to ride on them not only towards one's own personal quests, but also to inquire, question and challenge them.

The question of the difference between teaching and thinking is complex. While it is popularly believed that teaching must enable a student to acquire enough skills to cater to the market, in other words, to understand how much to "put in" in order to "get maximum out", the academic space gears individuals to think of emerging situations and co-adapt and co-evolve with them. Providing vocational skills is what teaching often succumbs to. In the case of architecture, it would be to make sure that the student is able to draw out accurate and reasonably legible drawings using simple to complex softwares. Such a goal makes the teaching objective tangible far too quickly, and also gives a managerial agenda to the teachers - to make the students best in commanding any production tool they are handling. In addition, they want to enable students in architecture to achieve reasonable judgement over shapes and forms. Yet, this is not thinking, for it merely freezes thinking to a limited set of tools that students can utilize in their professional futures.

 To think of a tool is different from merely using it to create a product. For example, to use AutoCAD for making architectural drawings is different from thinking of it as a tool to draw. It will be helpful to mention here, for example, that Prasad publishes many of his books on an application like Microsoft Powerpoint, in addition to using it as a presentation tool. What Prasad has successfully been able to exploit is Powerpoint's facility to work with text and images/graphics in a free flowing space. He constantly tweaks the features of the system to creates books of different formats, sizes; layering multiple graphics that seem at par with others produced using more sophisticated softwares today like CorelDraw or Adobe Indesign. Does it mean that we are underutilizing these new advanced softwares? Or does it mean what Prasad is abusing Powerpoint?

Neither. The answer lies in his example on the way we look at the tree. Prasad has simply understood that each of the softwares allows one to work with text and images in different capacities. And Powerpoint is able to offer him reasonable tools to create books and publish them at his will. Expoliting its features has saved him the trouble of investing time to learn a new, highly sophisticated software. Yet, this doesnot mean that he is unaware of the potentials of the software he doesnot know. But by being cognizant of the simple rubric which lies at the heart of these programs - ie the play between text and the image, he is able to gauge the capacities of each of these production tools.

Teaching and thinking are thus different, but mutually supportive. In today's world, one could confidently claim that teaching has become redundant. With the huge amount of tutorials and self-help platforms, teaching oneself is hardly a hurdle. One just needs access to basic infrastructure like an internet or a good library. Even without these, people in India have tremendous aptitude to adapt. Take a walk along the electronic lanes or the small mobile repair shops where you will find young drop-outs fiddling with mini components of the black box and getting your dysfunctional devices operational. This is a matter of practice, that skips text books or rote learning. 

It is thus time to imagine of a form of teaching that facilitates thinking. We have to work towards a way of teaching that enable students methods of thinking and analyzing. But these pointers do not really tell us why the discursive space in a city like Mumbai has been dead? In my mind there are several speculations. Firstly, I feel there is a lurking dissonance of thoughts and values between the intellectuals of the city. They do not comply with each other and in general, there is a narrowed sense of respect. Respect is ghettoized. Secondly, there is a dire struggle to achieve power, to gain reputation. This has made the intellectual landscape extremely insecure, resulting into a kind of coldness, an inertness. Such insecurity manifests into perpetual bubbling of new institutions, where new monies are pooled in, and new resources are created. To talk in the field of architecture, there is no single space or archive which any one in the city has access to. There are no individuals or names in our city, as Aakar Patel rightly mentions as Mumbai's crime. There are no holistic institutions that offer space for different kinds of discourses to co-exist. There are several camps, there are several schools, but still thus, in my opinion, there is still a lack of an academic space.

(there are more thoughts, but in keeping the length of the blog post, more ideas will be discussed in some other writing over here subsequently)

Vartalaap at AOA

I was invited to a student run initiative 'Vartalaap' (eng: Conversation) organized at the Academy of Architecture today. Vartalaap demands the invitees to talk on a subject of their choice after which students can have a discussion with them. I was together in a session with Chaitanya Karnik for this vartalaap. I have never come across a situation where an audience is ready to listen to whatever I wanted to talk about. This invitation left me in some serious thought on what I would have to tell the world if given a podium for 30 minutes?

A few days back in an academic council meeting at SEA, I had the opportunity of meeting a number of intellectuals, practitioners and academicians from different disciplines - most of them quite noted in their own fields. In this gathering was also a film maker Madhushree Dutta, whom I have passingly known (and so has she known me passingly). Over a round of drinks she went on to narrate her initial journey into the larger arena of cultural politics, and how funding for art projects is often secured. Madhushree recalled a meeting with an organization as large as the UN where prominent people from different fields were invited and asked for what they would like to do (or so is what I remember). At that time, being a young film maker still finding her way through the cultural landscape in India, Madhu felt quite lost. She asked to herself, "Madhu, if someone asks you to talk on any topic of your choice, what will you talk?" She further asked herself, "You don't have any thing to say, to tell the world?" (quotes are not verbatim) Madhu certainly lost a great opportunity, but this piece of her experience held much importance for me. The above incident happened in Madhu's life more that 20 years ago. Recently she has been invited to be on the jury panel for documentary films that will be presented in the Venice Bienalle 2015. It's quite an honour, and Madhu was very happy too, to have traveled thus far in her professional journey.

When I was invited for Vartaalaap I faced a similar dilemma. Ofcourse this talk was not organized by any mega institution, but the pressure to think of a subject that I would have liked to talk about kept me wondering through out the week, to the effect that I demanded the organizing team to define a theme. Thoughts similar to those of Madhu's ran in my head - I wondered if I really had any thing to talk, to share? Rather, I questioned, "Don't I have any thing to talk?"

While I decided to recite a chapter of my master's thesis finally, today was a bigger relief. Chaitanya had put together a presentation last night for this session. He gave an elaborate presentation, in precise answer to the question of what after all would he have to say on the subject of architecture after his years of engagement with the very profession.

Chaitanya is an idealist, and his talk was constructed from the stand point of an idealist. He argued on what must one think like, recalling Plato, Vitruvius as well as Corbusier and their tryst with idea versus reality. Chaitanya has lectured on a similar subject with the same anecdotes to many students in the past, and I have been fortunate to have witnessed his lectures on theory of design before. The sheer energy and assertion with which he places his point is enthusiastic, and the listener is quite likely to be mesmerized by the world he creates through his passionate words. Chaitanya believes in purity - of language, expression and architecture. He has excellent command over several languages - he never mixes Hindi with English, or Bengali with Marathi - all are languages known to him personally, along with his investment in Sanskrit. He believes that everything that is true of language is true of architecture. Grammar, structure, meaning and communication - all occur when creating architecture - it is ordered. Rather, it has to be ordered.

Reeling through examples of artists and architects like Isamu Noguchi, Zaha Hadid, Le Corbusier, Gunther Uecker or traditional examples like the English Gardens or the Japanese buildings, he evoked that architecture demands perfection. Chaitanya eulogized about the personalities that the discipline of architecture celebrates too. His focus thus was on building a character, a personality one must be in order to be able to produce a piece of architecture, that leaves behind an idea, that lives much beyond a persons life. Even in the past, Chaitanya has held in his opinion that one's work is not separate from oneself. One's work is one's life and vice versa. "Our job today," he went on to say, "is to create ideas and ways to build ideas."

There were several beautiful anecdotes and comparisons from literature, sculpture, poetry and philosophy that he shared over the entire lecture, which are hard to note now, because I haven't had the chance to record them. However, intermittently he spoke of some examples like Benares, and also ended with an image showing a man on the ghats of Ganga bathing, backed by his own child perhaps, who aided to rub his back.

Chaitanya's passionate talk created a space of idealism in the room which I was hesitant to dismantle. Hesitant because I have experienced the power of idealism and also because I wanted the students to feel it so that they are energized. After all, if there is any space you can practice idealism, it is the academia. Also, idealism according to me is best employed as an academic project, or one can call it a philosophical project. It is with skepticism that I entered the conversation. Positioning myself to not be invested much in the idea of idealism any longer and to be someone who has taken to cultural mapping, I interpreted Chaitanya's notion of idealism to be top down - one that decides the ideal and works out a way to achieve it.

Within this, Chaitanya introduced personalities of two kinds, both which have different methods of deciphering the same knowledge, or truth (about the self, or the world). One is the believer and the other is the skeptic. He mentioned both as valid modes of moving towards giving birth to an idea, but personally held the position of the believer - he who believes, for example, that there exists God, there exists truth, there exists the possibility of manifesting the ideal. I seemed to hold the other extreme - that of the skeptic - that of the non-believer, the one who doubts, one who is unsure, ambiguous, although not dismissing the idea of perfection, rather interrogating it. However, both the believer and the skeptic, he said lead to the same point - whose paths are like the two opposite faces of a pyramid leading the the singular tip. The commonality between both personalities is their struggle to move towards the perfect - one is moving because he knows, the other is moving because he has to find, but towards the same goal.

The beauty of this conversation lay in the harmonious agreement of disagreements. Our comfort with each other's occasional diametrically opposite points of view did not bother each other, rather our logic of arrivals to a conclusion were clear. It also seemed that the path of belief as well as disbelief worked respectively for each of us. To simply state an example, if he believed, for instance, "God is there", I merely asked "Is God not there?" Both struggled to perhaps achieve that truth. But drives our search is the belief or disbelief respectively.

Such was the nature of today's conversation. I am hoping that there is some record that students have made of the talk by Chaitanya, for his examples were deep and beautiful.

I personally felt that the setting of vartalaap could have been different to have more interaction, it became more of a lecture rather than a conversation. For a conversation, however, both sides have to be equally prepared. Still, sometimes it is pure joy to see someone so deeply engaged in conversation with the self. In this spirit, I skipped my talk and let the audience float in the ideal space Chaitanya created for all of us.