PROJECTS FROM 2004-2010

Reports on methodologies –Dialogical situations in multiple private spaces of Public Sphere

Sanchayan Ghosh

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participation as an OBSERVER

  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 (1^st, 2nd & 3^rd).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.

participation as a FACILITATOR

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.

participation as an EXPLORER (outsider)

    LIGHT OF DARKNESS (A memoir to Saint Bede and the Coal Miners of Durham)

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 18^th 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

 Framwellgate Bridge forms a very significant site in the map of Durham. Both as a bridge and an architectural design Framwellgate bridge survives as memoir of layers of history that lay embedded to the history of the city and its people. The heavy stone laid walls of the bridge reflect the triumph and tragedy of successive history of enlightenment that camouflage the city of Durham so intensely. The gothic double arch to the bridge provokes one to think of an invisible eye with eyeballs that floats between the real and the obscure gazing much beyond the visible world.

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.

participation as a INSIDER

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 1^st August as GOBBET DAY.                                                             

                                    

This is our 2^nd year of operation. We are glad to inform you that on 1^st 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?’

Exploring the sites where trees have been planted in Vriksharopan.”

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 1^st 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 1^st 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.

So this present project explored the context of terrorism from multiple points of view.

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.

Inside the walls an artificial white rose maze will be setup .The path of the Rose maze will be designed with the word Doosra.which will lead to the four entry, exit points. The artificial rose bed in which the maze will be created will be made of artificial rose made from the plant popularly called Shola in Bengal. It will be made by traditional craftsmen who specialize in shola craft.(Shola craft is a very old traditional craft popular in West Bengal and Assam in India and Bangladesh .The stem of the plant will be sliced into thin layers to make ornaments for deities and for traditional toys . Shola is almost a dead craft today with very few artisans practicing it

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

 lay on the ground barren and empty

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