Reports
on methodologies –Dialogical situations in multiple private spaces of Public
Sphere
Sanchayan
Ghosh
.
Merge
down and resist
A Four Month Research based art Activity
with three Generations of Asian community in Bristol , 2004
This project focused on the context of
changing face of identity of three generation of Asians staying in Bristol . The process
incorporated three basic idea of participation as a methodology
·
Observation
·
Methodology of documentation
·
Realization of a Public Gesture
based on those documentation
Initially as an
outsider I adopted the position of observer. I was visiting most of the Asian
community centers in Bristol
to meet the different generations (1st, 2nd & 3rd).Soon
I realized that due to the lack of knowledge of English there is very less
participation of the member of the Asian community in the main socio-cultural
British life in general. So these community centers become the shelter and the
meeting point of most of the Asian people. By visiting these community centers
I was slowly able enter into the private life of some of the families and visit
their houses. I was surprised to see their shelf arrangement, which in most
houses become a space of nostalgia to collect objects from their motherland. I documented
these shelves in the drawing room by taking photographs. Slowly I started doing
video documentation of their life in Public and Private .I started interviewing
people from different generation about how they identify themselves as a British
and their idea of motherland.
Now came the
important phase of how to transform these experiences into a Public Gesture. I
decided to organize a meeting where I wanted to share the different opinions of
three generation with whom I interacted and have lunch together. We decided to
host an informal get-together in Spike
Island , the studio space
from where I was functioning. Interestingly the space where Spike Island
was located is that part of Bristol
where the locality is basically an area of the so-called white community. Most
of the Asian community preferred to stay in Easton
that is on the Eastern side of Bristol .
In fact it is interesting to note that most of the people with whom I met has
never visited this part of Bristol .
Even the road arrangement reflects a sense of separation within the city as Easton is almost cut off from the main area of Bristol . It surely
reflected the present position of the two communities and the lack of
communication between them. So this event provided the space for crossover. Moreover,
we planned a boat trip that will include the people from the Asian community.
On July, 23rd.
2004 I invited the members of the community that included Indians, Pakistanis
and Bangladeshis in Spike
Island for casual
meeting.
The whole
process was basically intended to create a relational space within the
community and not to make an object out of it. Spike Island
although a gallery space transformed into a public space of meeting and sharing.
Finally we went for the boat trip in the near by harbor .Some of the artists of
Spike Island who turned up for the meeting
also joined us. I played music of Abbasuddin (a singer composer from undivided India )as
we sailed.Later I played a DJ sound Track composed by Andrews who composed a music track called Resist Soundtrack with excerpts of music of the 50's that came with the migrants( like Tagore songs of Pankaj mallick, Salil Choudhury songs, popular bollywood songs and so on) and also rap and Afro-American sound tracks
Coming back to Calcutta , the greatest challenge was to evolve a process
of sharing my experience in Bristol
to a public who may have never seen the place and have known all those people
whom I have met. There will always be an incompleteness of information and a
fragmented experience and many of my memories will be lost in whatever I will share.
So I wanted to create a space that will create this experience of incompleteness.
I made a distorted garden hut had an exazarated perspective. The hut had
numerous binocular connected to the walls and the roof from outside. Through
the binoculars one can see the partial interiors which were basically
photographs from Bristol .
There was no direct access to the inside of the hut. Only the sounds of interviews
of different generations British Asians could be heard from outside.
A Memoir to Unknown Dwellers: A Loom
House
A Community based Art Activity in
Kokrajhar, Bodoland , Assam 2004-05
A workshop in Kokrajhar in December 2004 provided me an opportunity
to participate into the community life of Bodos, a tribal community in South of
Assam. Bodos for the last 50 years have been voicing a protest against racial
discrimination and cultural hierarchy in Assam . In the last 15 years the
movement took a violent shape with formation of the Bodo Liberation Tigers, who
wanted a separate state for the Bodos.A peace process is now in the progress as
the Indian Government have agreed and formed the Bodoland Territorial Council.
Traditionally
weaving is part of the everyday life of a Bodo household. Like other tribal
societies women participate in the weaving, and weave their own garments. In
fact there is a saying that if a Bodo Woman do not know weaving she will not
get a groom. So weaving as a process has a ritual significance in Bodo life.
Visiting a
place like Bodoland, which has just started to begin a new journey after a long
armed struggle, it was important initially to become an observer. I went to see
a local village with a young man from the village. I was eager to see the looms
in the houses and their method of weaving. But I came to know and see that
presently very few people weave in their own household. It was difficult for
individuals to weave independently and survive. Most of the individual looms
have been sold to a local factory and the villagers go and weave there as an
employee. So already the mode of production in the village has shifted from
self-production for personal use to a market based production. We met a weaver
in the village .He took us to his Loom House that used to accommodate ten looms.
The Loom House has almost broken down with two or three looms functioning. I
also met an old lady from the village. She showed us her loom house. There was
no loom. Her sons have shifted to other professions and have settled in the
city. As such the looms have broken down and lay as scraps on one corner. She
also took us to her son’s house in the same campus .The mud house where his son
used to live now lies abandoned.
The space where
the workshop was conducted was the campus of the Kokrajhar Music and Fine Arts
College . The College
stood little outside the city of Kokrajhar
in midst of an open landscape. During the arm struggle Government installed
military camps in tents inside the campus. Those tents left empty still stood
inside the campus. I decided to construct the Loom House inside one of these
tents.
We constructed the Loom House with the broken
loom fragments and also built a new loom by assembling pieces of different
non-functional looms. The idea was to reconstruct the privacy of weaving and
celebrates the new situation .The villagers participated in the process.
Many
of the local village women participated in the process of weaving. The process
started right from the beginning of winding the thread in a way so that it can
be put inside the loom, then setting the thread and the design inside the loom
and finally weaving a long stretch of cloth that spread all around the loom.
Then after the weaving was completed we covered the whole loom house with
remaining threads. After this, I invited all the members of the community to
share their views about the present situation in Bodoland, sitting inside the
loom house. Many shared their views and sang songs. Finally on the last evening,
all these experiences were projected on the Loom House with an LCD Projector
that was bought for the workshop. So all of a sudden the Loom house that was
constructed with fragments of broken looms started taking shapes of a village,
a portrait and started dancing and singing.
A Light based Installation on Framwell Gate
Bridge on the Wire
River in Durham ,North of England,2008
The phrase “The Age of Enlightenment” was frequently employed
by writers of 18th century prior to the French Revolution convinced the
emergence from centuries of darkness and ignorance into a new age enlightened
by reason, science, and a respect for humanity.
Most Enlightenment thinkers did not
renounce religion altogether. They opted rather for a form of Deism, accepting
the existence of God and of a hereafter, but rejecting the intricacies of
Christian theology. Human aspirations, they believed, should not be centered on
the next life, but rather on the means of improving this life.
More than a set of fixed ideas, the
Enlightenment implied an attitude, a method of thought. According to the German
philosopher Immanuel Kant, the motto of the age should be “Dare to know.”
Parallel to this idea of enlightenment
there is another definition of Enlightenment that is popular in the eastern
world. Enlightenment (Indian philosophy), in Buddhism and other religions of
Indian origin, reflects an idea of a state in which the individual rises above
desire and suffering and attains bliss. In this respect one can conclude that
idea of enlightenment in west refers to the process of manifestation and in
East it is more referred to the process of being. But interestingly both the
ideas deal with human existence, and the notion of self is predominant in both.
This
project on Enlightenment(looking east) that focus Durham as a context ,history and site. I
worked on the area of self and
enlightenment in respect of the history of Durham and research on certain existing tools
of enlightenment and try to evolve a method of engaging with the idea of
enlightenment as interpreted in east.
Local Context:
a.
Inspiration-I: Works of Saint
Bede and the folklores on venerable Bede.
As one watches
the burial of Saint Bede on the western extension of the cathedral in Durham
one is inspired by his scientific and rational mind who believed that earth is
round and not flat like a shield A man who is equally a scholar and a
mathematician evolved the system of AD and BC as a counting system of years.
But more
importantly I am inspired by the folklore where on comes to know that Bede
became blind at the later part of his life because of extensive reading in the
low candle light inside the church. The story goes that one day a young boy
from the monastery wanted to make fun of the blind scholar took him to a forest
area lying to him that some pilgrims were waiting to hear his words. Bede was
so inspired that he shared all his knowledge on the birth of universe and
Christianity and the life of Christ without knowing that he was only talking to
some broken trees, stones and bushes. As he finished his sermons the boy who
thought he had made great fun of the great scholar discovered to his surprise
that the trees and the bush were so inspired by Bede’s words that they were
praising by saying, “Amen venerable Bede”
So I thought
Saint Bede is one personality who could be looked upon as a bridge between faith and rationality,
science and realization.
b.
Inspiration-II: Just as the
soul of city of Durham dwells on the cathedral
and the castle the coal mines that lay across the river Weir in the countryside
as the soul of the project of Enlightenment in 18th century England .
Although the age of Enlightenment is hailed for its scientific inventions and
the Industrial revolution parallel knowledge like mining helped to sustain the
adventures of science. The great act of cutting coals in the darkness from the
core of earth is like bringing light from darkness. So miners form a bridge
between the knowledge of mind and labour, the two tools of enlightenment.
c.
Inspiration-III:Tradition of
knitting and patchworks developed in England in the age of Enlightenment
and can be looked upon as a parallel system of
knowledge that grew in the core of the domestic life of working
community to the knowledge of science
and technology. Women in miner’s houses when their husbands left for the day’s
job used to do knitting back home. There were numerous knitting clubs in
miner’s colonies.
Site of
Installation: FRAMWELLGATE
BRIDGE
Eye as a motif
and metaphor
Obviously the
double arch of the Framwellgate lay behind the inspiration of the motif of eye
as an Installation piece. Parallelly the motif of eye is inspired by the
folklore of venerable Bede ,the inner sight of knowledge and the eyes of the coal miner’s that bring light from the
darkest core of earth .
Participation as an Insider
Participation as
an insider is always quite tricky and vulnerable. In a community based art
activity the visibility and the identity of the artist is extremely important.
The position of artist becomes the initiation point of any activity; the
position of the artist gets exposed on the level of personal relationship. So
for me working in Santiniketan is equally from the position of a teacher and
also as part of the community member who is equally involved in the private and
public life of Santiniketan. So participation in an insider position is always
a very slow process of patience and interaction. In a city position one can
initiate a process an vanish but in a close community situation there is no
escape, there is a constant visibility and responsibility to the site and the
community life with which one is interacting.
How Art Thou Living-A community based Exploration of
the 80 yrs of tree Planting (Brikhsharopan Festival ) in Santiniketan by Mono
Gobbet Society,2007
Context
Sanitiniketan
today survives both as site with a cultural legacy and heritage and also in the
formal way as a university campus. The overlap of these two states of existence
make the place both vulnerable, at the same time structured. The annual
ritualistic events like Briksharopan which started initially as the process of
developing the landscape of the place and also to create an intimate
relationship between its community and the environment, today also functions as
a heritage event that projects the cultural framework of the process called Asram
education but also an economic compulsion as many of the local people are
economically dependent on these annual events which generate huge amount of
tourist attraction. So Santiniketan constantly shuffles between an academic zone and also a heritage zone that
sustains the everyday livelihood of local residents living around Santiniketan.
The landscape of Santiniketan today functions both as a memory of a ideology
and also the administrative network of the present academic expansion. Today
Santiniketan has become a more vulnerable site with its duality and dialectics
and as such it is also becoming a new site for nurturing individual differences
and co-existence. The present project evolved out of the need to map this
duality of the site through an exploration, a visit to the sites where
Briksharopan festival which is happening for the last 80 yrs and map the
evolution and expansion of the landscape of Santiniketan both as a community
space and also as an academic space.
Research and Observation
The process was initiated through the
activity of Mono Gobbet Society.
Excerpts of the letter issued by MonoGobbet society as an invitation
in Santiniketan to the community.
“MONOGOBBET SOCIETY is a group of
conscious, logical fools who have come together to form a unique society in
Santiniketan.The main motto of this society is to conduct series of meaningless
GOBBET ADVENTURES in and around Santiniketan from time to time. In this respect
the gobbets have declared 1st
August as GOBBET DAY.
This
is our 2nd year of operation. We are glad to inform you that on 1st
August, 2007 MONOGOBBET SOCIETY will
arrange a GoBBet Expedition in search of
the Trees of Vriksharopan.
When Gurudev Rabindranath
Tagore initiated the Vriksharopan Utsav as an activity in Santiniketan the land
was barren with its Khoai and its few palm trees. More than 80 years have
passed. Like its community new soils have been laid and numerous trees have
been brought from outside and planted around the landscape. Like its community
which comprises people from all over India
and world trees from different parts of India and world have come and grown
on this land. This expedition is to explore, how they have adapted to the Land,
how they are surviving today.
In
this occasion the society cordially
invites you to join in the Expedition ‘How
Art Thou Liveth?’
So some of the
members of the MonoGobbet Society ,initially students of Kala Bhavana which
also included me, made a research on locating the places and the kind of trees
that were planted in Santiniketan.The informations are available in the old
Visva bharati Quarterly journals from Rabindra Bhavan ,which is the oldest
community journal from Visva Bharati that documented its annual events. On
basis of these information a map of Santiniketan was created demarking the
possible sites of Brikhsharopan in the last 80 years. Two big Flex prints of
this map were installed around the
campus referring 1st of August as the expedition date and requesting
all the community members to join the expedition.
The members of the
monogobbet society then prepared individual placards referring individuals
sites of planting and also the names of the trees (where it is available).All
the names of the trees were available from the research. On 1st of
August, 2007, on a rainy day all the unofficial floating members of Monogobbet
society assembled in front of the Mandir
Gate(the main entrance to the campus) and the expedition was officially
started. Printed version of the map with names of the location and trees were
distributed among the assembled people .Together with the students some of the
faculty members also joined in.Shamalidi a noted environmentalist also joined
in to share her memory of her father Sri Sudhir Khastagir, who planted one of
the trees in 1950s.So the expedition started with Shamalidi’s memory. Then
slowly we collectively started moving around the campus following the map. As
we followed the map we visited sites and places where we have never ventured to
travel earlier. So the location of the trees almost became a new route and way
of looking at the site Santiniketan. Moreover it also provided us with
opportunity to understand how the campuses have expanded and also how it has
transformed. As we followed the map we realize because of the expansion of the
campus and the increase of the number of the departments many of the roads have
now been fenced to demarcate the campus of the individual departments.\, as
such many of the site of Briksharopan have become inaccessible today. Moreover
in many places the trees were not visible as some have died ,some uprooted due
to storm and some vanished. So accordingly the explorers planted those
individual placards with name and year of plantation and also referred the
stated of the tree and wrote missing where they were not found. The whole
process continued for almost three days and it generated lots of enthusiasm
among the young participants as it became an opportunity for them to know the
place and its extension and for those who have seen it everyday a new position
to understand it on a new note.
So in this project
my role as a pedagogue got transformed into a participant both as an explorer
and also as an insider being part of the community of Santiniketan.This project
provided me to relieve from the fixed position of a teacher to also a learner as
my position was also equally vulnerable as the other participants in relation
to the information of the trees and the history of the site.There were no
experts only memories and apprehensions to operate with.
BUTTERFLY EFFECT: THE INTERIER
This project in the small INTERIER of a residential/gallery room
of Gandhara Art Gallery owned and lived by Sudipta Sen of Flat No.5 in 1B,
Gurusaday road,Kolkata-19 was explored as workshop site for a collaboration
with 14 students from Jammu & Kashmir, Assam,Tripura,Meghalaya and Mizoram
,who are presently studying in Kala Bhavana,Visva Bharati,Santiniketan.
The term "butterfly effect" is
related to the work of Edward_Lorenz" Chaos Theory and sensitive
dependence on initial conditions, first described in the literature by Jacques Hadamard in 1890.Butterfly_effect" "Dynamical
system" dynamical system may produce
large variations in the long term behavior of the system. The phrase refers to
the idea that a butterfly 's wings
might create tiny changes in the _atmosphere.Earth's
atmosphere" atmosphere that may
ultimately alter the path of a tornado or delay, accelerate or even prevent the
occurrence of a tornado in a certain location. The flapping wing represents a
small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of
events leading to large-scale alterations of events.
Terrorism which is now globally looked as a
term for terror, immorality and Evil has its root marked in the progress of the
Good as projected by the history of European Enlightenment. The philosophy of
Enlightenment in the western civilization
have produced an unique history of rejection, appropriation and the
exclusion of the history ,myth and the cultural forms that are outside its
periphery and has termed it as the ‘Other’.
The downfall of the Communist in the cold war and emergence of a global liberal power have evolved into a singular, hegemonic ,cultural
and economic system.
Details of graphiti and Installations done by the
student partcipants
In India Terrorism on hand is an extension of this global phenomenon
of the post cold war world order on the other it still carries the legacy of an
Enlightenment project that came with the British rule. Most of the act of
terror that operate within India is an extension or a reaction to the colonial
past and the British creation of the map of India and the negotiations (the
inclusion and the exclusion) it made while determining the borders of a country
called India. Movements that started as a freedom struggle against the British
became unlawful act against state and nation in some areas in independent India and
evolved into a terrorist act in the present context. Someone said somebody’s
terrorist is somebody’s freedom fighter.
Wall
Graphiti inside the gallery room in Gandhar
Art Gallery ,Kolkata
Firstly 15 students from North and North
Eastern students of India explored the local context of terrorism in India
through an interactive dialogue and reflected on their private experiences and
ideas on terrorism and violence as individual groups in Santiniketan.Then they
travelled from Santiniketan to Kolkata to Gandhar Art Gallery small Interior
.There they once again interacted and worked together for 6 days on the issue
,but this time all together. I generated a workshop condition of follow the
leader where every individual will get a chance to become a leader and share
their ideas on terrorism.This whole process of collective individual sharing
was documented on a vedio recorder that was kept on one corner of the
room.After the interactive session,the room was left to the participants to
reflect upon through writing or drawing on the walls.Finally this room with the
wall graphitis and the vedio documents was left open to the public to share.
Parallel to this activity of the students inside the room a life cycle of the
butterfly was installed live inside the room. In this respect the INTERIER will
be transformed into a site where the lifecycle of a butterfly will be created
in an artifitial environment which will physically explore the flappings of the
butterfly wings and metaphorically explore the idea of the Butterfly Effect as
a context to the historical context to the emergence of terrorism in the world
order.
In this respect my position as a pedagogue who is mostly introduced to the term and experience of terrorism
through books and media was that of a facilitator, observer, learner and
participator in the whole process
TITLE: DOOSRA-“The Other” Maze
The word Doosra is an Urdu word
which means the Other one.It is also used in Hindi and mostly in India
,Pakistan and other urdu speaking nations.In recent time the word has evolved
as a popular cricketing term as a different variation of spin bowling in
cricket,Where it is bowled in disguise of a off spin in such as way as to spin away from
right-handed batsmen.Doosra is popularised in the cricketing world of Pakistan ,India , Srilanka and now it has
been accepted in the regular format of the game of cricket. So Doosra reflects
a post colonial context in the game of cricket which originated in England .Inclusion
of Doosra as a cricketing term refers to the evolution of the game of cricket
which is accommodating improvisations evolving in other parts of the world
(which were earlier part of the British colonial territory) as part of the
mainstream cricketing culture. Doosra reflects the irreversible process of
cultural hybridity that is evolving in the age of post national identity.
The present project is a
performative site that invites the visitors to enter,encounter and explore the
Doosra through a journey of an artificial rose
maze where the pathway of the maze will be made in the design of the
word Doosra .This project will explore and encounter the notion of
multicultural citizenship in respect of the cultural hegemony of new cultural
nationalism in relationship to “Self and the Other”.
The impact of migration is like a
maze that on one hand has created chaos and confusion and on the other pushed
the border of national identity both as an individual and as a community. It
has led to the emergence of multiple transnational spaces and hybrid cultures.
Like a maze it is an irreversible process of cultural encounter of conflict and
interdependency, of merging and resistance .It is one of the most dynamic
states of cultural interactions counter shadowed by the structure of power, a
game of cultural interactions, crossover, conflicts and confusion-a non-
linear, open-ended journey like a maze.
The
Project
The present site the Regent’s Park is one of the
major Public Parks in London
that is mostly used for hosting private community events, games and other
corporate events.
This present project starts with the same notion
of acquiring private space within the Freize art fair to create an interface
between the public private encounter
A 40’X25’ section of the Art fair will be fenced with sliced bamboo
walls commonly used in Eastern India to
demarcate a temporary private settlement mostly common with the migrated
localities. The four walls of this land will have four gateways for entry and
exit.
So a passerby will have to enter,encounter and engage in the Doosra to
finally get out of the fenced bed of artificial roses.
After the first two days of the Installation
inside the Regents
Park , People were let
feel
free to collect a rose back home. And so on
the final day all the roses vanished from the
Frieze Art Fair, only the metal perforated
sheet bearing the marks of the text Doosra
.