What made 48°C, an ambitious public art showing in New Delhi, a success was not the sum of its cutting-edge works but a sum of the journeys that it unleashed, reflects Bharati Chaturvedi
If you live in a big city anywhere in India (or even in the world), you are likely to have noticed bits of sculpture or statues in plazas and parks. And if you have ever spent time in official New Delhi, you would have, additionally, seen murals on the sides of numerous official buildings. That, for most part, is public art in India.
The problem with these is not what they are in themselves but that commissioners of such projects stop at such ideas. Meanwhile, public art itself has moved on, becoming far more cutting edge than these offerings.
The recent 48°C street art festival in Delhi offered some possibilities. To its credit, the Delhi government was an important partner, along with GTZ (multi-syllabled German Development Agency), the Max Mueller Bhawan and artistic director Pooja Sood. The festival’s greatest achievement was to put into place a circuit of travel and acknowledgement of Delhi’s numerous ecological faultlines.
To do this, the choice of sites —from Jantar Mantar (an enclosed site allowed officially for protest, just next to the Parliament House, symbol of democratic will) to Roshanara Gardens (the only site, it seems in Delhi, with the original Delhi vegetation still intact, built by Shahjahan’s daughter) — was strategic, because this underscored the city’s micro-histories. The artists would intervene in such spaces with the idea of unpeeling the layers, while engaging with wider urban considerations. The terrain was marked out with the Delhi Metro as focal point, inviting travel without cars.
Navjyot Altaf worked close to the Barakhamba Road Metro Station, in an old house whose owners have not yet sold off to commercial builders. The process of building the Metro has cut down hundreds of trees in the area (and thousands for transportation elsewhere). Navjyot spent several months learning from office-goers and shopkeepers about the change in this landscape, interviewing them on film. These she played on large screens facing the busy road, while recording viewer reactions and projecting them real time on a screen next door.
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Inside, Krishnaraj Chonat hung a dead tree, roots intact, from a crane — a eulogy to the new Barakhamba Road. The response was robust, with passersby debating if the tree was a deliberate act or a municipal work in action, discussing the films and offering their own advice to the city at large.
At Pul Bangash, in Old Delhi, Motornama, a spectacular journey by local cycle-rickshaw walas, unwinded around this former industrial area. The journey took participants into small enterprises — tarpaulin-making, thread-spinning work that is invisible, if not illegal in most of the city. Far from reducing these to touristic spots disrupting every day work, the attempt forced the entry of consumers into backward linkages of their own lifestyles. In some places, mutual curiosity initiated a social/economic/political intermingling of workers and visitors, a non-confrontation that may never be repeated, but worked within the festival framework. This “trip” ended at Roshanara gardens, another hotspot of social diversity.
Here, Vivan Sundaram worked with Delhi’s recyclers to create a raft from old bottled-water bottles. Their bright fuchsia caps intact, they were set on a shallow, empty surface, originally designed to hold a reflecting pool of water. Instead, now, Vivan’s raft reflected the new water of the new city — enclosed not in parks but in plastic bottles, themselves petroleum products.
These two dwindling and immiscible resources — water and oil —lay intertwined in every unit of the raft. But Vivan didn’t allow for trash to remain inert — he completed the cycle by acknowledging the human ecology of the city-waste pickers and scrap traders, who finally received the plastic, to be recycled into yarn. Not only waste-pickers, but also young people — typically the main users of this park — hung around the work, decoding it in several individual ways.
What make each of these works successful was their ability to generate a ripple effect amongst everyday users of the space and curious visitors from outside. It was vital that unlike other kinds of public art, these had a shelf life, so they excited thought continuously while they existed, and their absence created a second generation, and shorter, cycle of discourse. But what made the show successful was not the sum of is successful works, but the sum of the journeys it unleashed.