stories behind the door DOCCUMENTATION BOOK
space.
place.
image.
maker.
site.
viewer.
stories behind the door DOCCUMENTATION BOOK
devika shah Project
Art In Transit amitabh. arzu. ruchika. samir
Stories behind the door is a journey that laid its foundation in the Peenya Metro Station. It has been a learning process through varied interventions which fueled the development of an artistic practice of approaching work onsite.
Introduction This project comprises of varied layers of understanding the act of arriving at a finished image. A journey that let me decipher the idea of working in public spaces, understanding the crucial nature of the after life of an image and positioning myself within this vast field of Public Art. My prior experience of working in the field ofspace and furniture design and my fascination towards looking at structures in a quirky yet observant way helped me take this interest one step further.
c o n t Peenya
Entrance
Mapping
SFS colony
S10
S10
first experience
learning
understanding the space
intervention
Exhibition
S10
start of the journey
breakthrough
e n t s Working onsite Bombay diaries 1,2,3
Peenya Site Selection Structure
Contentment
Collaboration admiration
Visualisation Work onsite
Peenya The first time is always full of surprises. The idea of visiting the Peenya Metro Station was quite overwhelming. Partly because our faculty Amitabh and Samir made it sound like a big deal and the fact that this project, Art in Transit, aims at making this enormous space into an art station. There were certain speculations as I had visited M.G.Road Metro Station but I didn’t expect what was in front of me. The Peenya Metro Station represented the strength and the ambition of the Peenya Industrial Area. Its vastness supported the emptiness that occupied the structure from within. Little did I know that this was just the start of my journey into breaking structures and understanding their nature through my perception.
Mapping My first interaction with the S 10 space was a combination of fear and curiosity. Admidst the massive Metro Station and the expansive Tumkur Highway lay a small settlement and it was while getting acquainted with the surrounding of the Station that I came across this mysterious locality. My first interaction was with a veteran inspector Vaghmare who warned me not to go around alone wandering in those streets. I was instantly afraid but also very curious. I wanted to know more about this locality not because I was warned, but because of its intriguing location. Fortunately a kid agreed to accompany me and show me around.
First experience
Curiosity led me to map the incredible space that S10 was. S 10 doesn’t have much of a settlement but a lot to offer and enough to intrigue you. Tejas, a 9th standard student took me around. I realized that the Industrial area is extremely close to this settlement. Its literally a small island surrounded by sea of heavy metal and cement blocks. There were indeed some areas where I couldn’t dwell into much but I wanted to focus more on S10 area.
Left top; Interpretation of my First journey to S10. The colored streets are the accessible ones and grey ones are the deserted restricted ones. Down; Tejas.
S 10 S 10, a settlement under Sector 10 of Peenya. I started making frequent visits to understand the space more intimately through sketching, photography and talking to the populace. Afternoons were a jackpot for me as I got a chance to talk to a lot of people as they used to sit outside their houses due to no electricity. My usual interaction took place there, at the entrance, outside the door.
Understanding the space
I realized that these interactions and collection of stories usually happened outside the doors. I started analyzing this aspect of spatial elements - like doors - contributing more to a space than just being a wooden piece that allows one to walk in and walk out. Just like the stories, every door had its own character. It provided individuality. The colors, the wood, the garland that hung, the Sali (lock), the different design of the Rangoli (white powder), colors used outside the house and the face of Lord Raavan. Every element had its own purpose.It gave an identity to the structure.
Exhibiton We were asked to put up an exhibition accounting for the work that we had done until then. My research and thought process were still revolving around this idea of structural importance in spaces and how it is created. I decided to represent this acquired information through the medium of floor painting and highlighted the structural element that induced my thought process - doors. The piece was called stories behind the door. I named it because in that piece the doors stood out as 3D structure and laid on the floor was this painting of S 10, namely Streets of S 10. So while walking from the stairs towards the piece, laid on the platform, the first thing you see are these frames and then the painting below. Since then I decided to use “stories behind the door “as my project name. It’s the piece that unknowingly helped me to embark upon this journey of being a Public Artist.
Borrowing elements from local housing in the area, this piece attempts to characterize the lives of the lesser known communities that have inhabited Peenya for decades so as to lend to those in transit a sense of belonging through empathy.
Image- Work getting flooded just 2 days before the exhibition.
Start of the journey
After my work getting flooded, I realized that working on the floor as a medium was something that needed to be looked into. It was not only the floods but the reaction I got while working on the floor. People looked at the piece from varied directions. The painting being on the floor let the people look at it from different directions, move around it. I decided to take this as a step forward for my next Floor painting.
Entrances Structures enable me to relate to my experiences. Before that I didn’t realize it wasn’t just the doors that explained the idea of S10 as a space and my involvement as an intruder .I was filtering the spatial elements that fall under the broad term “Entrances”. The stones assembled in the form of a bench outside certain homes, the washing stone on the street, the tap right next to the pavement, huge water buckets right outside the house, constant open doors. These elements formed an interaction with each other. Since my next intervention aimed at how a viewer entered the image through different points, I wanted to continue to use the metaphor of entrances.
SFS colony Carrying on from my research in S10, I decided to recreate gathering spaces in that area. The image was aimed at understanding the nature of the painted floor and how the spectator decides to walk into it.
Learning
While working on this piece in the SFS colony in Yelahanka New Town the idea of it being away from Peenya bothered me. I realized that I wanted to display my learning about the site in that particular site to go in sync with the place. If I am borrowing the elements from that space, the only place it would merge with the most is that space itself.
Image - Image - this painting was a homage to the important gathering spaces in Peenya S10. The composition is divided into 4 different views. T The viewer has to go around the painting to get an understanding of it. The prominent part of the painting is the tree which is a centre for a lot of activities, there’s a temple situated right next to it, a shade where all the construction working men have their lunch, an open ground for the kids and right opposite is a vegetable vendor. On the right hand side of the painting is a small sketch of the metro bridge which signifies the placement of the entire Peenya S10 community below it. On the left are some outside seating of the houses. Certain elements like stairs, benches and tables are added to provide a sense of seating used around the area.
S 10 My last image didn’t work well cause it didn’t merge with its surroundings. As I was working with the idea of entering S10, interventions onsite would help me gather more insights about the space, because the process of leaving an image behind involved making that image onsite. This mattered as it increased my familiarity to the space which enriches the process itself.
Intervention
It was a simple intervention of how extracting elements off the site and placing them onsite to understand the relationship of an image left behind the existing space/image. Working onsite is a play of understanding the surroundings. Nature of the site can be interpreted subjectively.
Image - Sketch of the new site.
Images - First few sketches done onsite. This intervention was extremely important to locate my standing as a street/public art practitioner.
Image - The image formed was inclined more towards assessing and accessing the site through a viewers point of view rather than the image makers. Its simplicity explains the raw nature of my approach towards work on site.
S 10 The most important thing about site selection was working under the idea of Entrances. The site was refined through the lens of the concept of using Entrances as my entry point for this intervention. This led to classifying the elements present around entrances, into two categories, permanent and impermanent structures. While making my composition offsite I chose to eliminate these impermanent elements, the life that comprises the entrances, because they are already present there. But once I reached onsite, I changed my composition entirely. I chose to blend the permanent structures, the walls, the benches, and the door; cause the impermanent structures keep changing. Placement of image was important for it to blend and merge into the space.
Image - Image of the new site
Image- Elongated Permanence
Breakthrough
Learning from this intervention was the use of scale and most importantly not considering rendering details when it comes to floor painting and scale. Working in larger area involves crisp lines, play of color and not spending too much time on site. Working too much on site made me bored of looking at that image, and adding details made me more restless, cause each day I took to render these details, the next day some other section of the image started fading. That did disturb me when I was onsite. I didn’t give much thought to the image I left behind before because it was a floor painting. The colors were going to wash off in time. But I did keep it in mind once I got back to Peenya.
Working Onsite Working onsite is a stimulating cycle of responding to queries. You may ask what these queries are but what’s more important is how each intervention is aimed at informing those queries and not resolving them. This constant state of forming queries helped me to think and respond through site. The first few hours that I spend onsite are always very crucial. The ideas start coming in then which are fresh as the site is new.
Bombay Diaries From the 1st to 7th of March 2015, The Urban Vision, a think-do tank of architects, invited the Art in Transit project and its current batch of final year students to participate in a week-long charrette creating site-specific public artwork in Samtanagar, Kandivali, Mumbai. It was a great opportunity for me to go ahead with the process on a different site. It was both exciting and nerve wracking. Through a series of three interventions, I tried to highlight the utility of these place making elements by distorting their functionality. This included addition of simple tools like gradient, shadows and bending the existing structure itself. The sited chosen had a variation of being highly available to people travelling in and out of Kandivali and also residing in Thakur village. The experiments left behind the viewer to confront a direct interpretation of place making via structures and draw attention to how these space elements, like the transformer or pillars, are landmarks of great importance.
1.
Highly dense entrances have various vantage points through which they can be entered. This complicates the environment around that space. In this noise the entire indication of that space being an entry point is lost. The strucutre of the transformer provided a minimal sense of access to a highly populated surrounding. Highlighting or transforming the way an onlooker examines the site or even acknowledges the role it plays is something that I have tried to achieve with this intervention. Presence of multiple vantage points at varied distances demanded a stretched out image. Even though the image is still work in progress onsite, finished technical elements like using a gradient background helped to fulfill certain purpose.
Image - Left, work onsite; right visualisation Unfortunately I couldn’t finish this piece due to permission issues. I was asked to stop working on this piece on the 3rd day because we were unable to get permission from the Head Traffic Police of that area.
2.
Distort Emerging perpendicular from the ground, structures like pillars often go unnoticed. These lines, vertical to horizontal, need to be exploited to their fullest potential. Highlighting these elements signifies their presence as markers of place for that community.
Image- This was a one day intervention. The application was achieved using a ladder and roller attached to a steel rod.
3.
Shone Playfulness within structures exhibited in public initiates a smooth conversation between these elements. This dialogue is achieved by playing with application of a single color that portrays reflection of a single structure painted over a group of structures.
Image- I used spray cans for this simple application. It is quick and easy but I would have rather prefer paints. It took me time to realize that working onsite is not similar to working on a canvas. Switching mediums is still a work in progress.
Contentment
The more I spend time onsite the more I got detached to the image, which is of grave importance. The moment I used to question everything about the image or start overloading the image with things which might not be of relevance on site, diminishing the quality of the image I had my doubts of returning back to S 10 because the familiarity to the site might change the thrust of the work. Unfortunately that fear had an upper hand when the half day intervention on site was commenced. Intention was to leave behind sharp and crisp interventions of elements found on site. I entered the site with the idea of an outcome rather than forming an image onsite. There’s a reason why the conceptualizing onsite has more of a difference than just selecting a site for a pretty picture to go on it. Thinking through site has been helpful throughout the journey of art in transit, and leaving that initiated 8 small interventions which were a fine for the people but didn’t serve the purpose.
Collaboration Working in collaboration with Ishita is one of the more important and useful interventions that I have conducted. We both have a different way of interpreting and assessing site. After the Bombay trip and S10 fiasco I was anxious to see how I take the process forward.
Image - Left, Ishita’s work in Bombay; right- one of my work in Bombay.
Image - “Inside out�, is a dialogue, that the site creates within itself and the viewer. A dialogue that the under construction structural elements like the broken walls, corroded iron rods have with the only complete structure in that vicinity, the watchman shelter. We have used the elements present onsite to help us navigate through the image. It felt like creating a non existing open entrance.
Admiration
This collaboration made me more aware of the steps I take while ideating on site. Its different cause there is someone with whom you have constantly discuss the decisions that you plan on taking. This was one of the smoothest collaboration when it came to expressing thoughts. We both had different ideas but we were able to find similarities and incorporate our differences as well.
Peenya It was time to get back to Peenya Metro Station.
Site Selection After working on the collaboration piece in Yelahanka new town, I was confident about going back to Peenya. Initially I was finding it hard to come to a better decision of choosing a site in the station or outside. At first it was overwhelming for me because I was approaching this piece as THE piece. The load of it being the final one did haunt me a little bit. After a week of being stuck I realized that I should treat this work as part of the process and not as the end of my project. After that things got smoother. The site that I chose was right outside the Metro station. I chose this site as it restricted the flow of structure. It lowered level of intricacy the entire site provided if looked at from a particular vantage point. And that vantage point became my guide. This came through sketching onsite.
Structure From identifying entry points to highlighting dead structures, a space has always intrigued me into thinking about place making. It took time identifying the site but the idea of using a spatial element present onsite to help me break the deadness was an idea that occurred to me the very time I saw the new site.
Visualisation Until now I have never used a definite pre drawing of how my work onsite might look like but I had to this time because I was dealing with scale varied and different vantage points. Initially I did talk about how I am affected by paint fading away from the floor and the fact that it does disturb because someone is constantly looking and experiencing that image, the public. If it fading in two days bothered me so much, it would not be wise to use paint for floor painting for this piece too. I have decided to use something more permanent, like ceramic tiles.
Work Onsite Right now I am concentrating on being onsite. There are different experiences every day. Whether it’s the rain or going up and down the scaffolding or the ladder a hundredth time to get that perfect angle to kill the corner and make the stairs with a flow. Or answering to the passing audience about the wall, asking about their opinion or when I am feeling extremely tired and someone would just come and encourage me just by saying that they really appreciate this initiation of painting and it gives me the energy to go back on the scaff and work; when they try to understand what I am doing instead of just ask me what I am doing. Making a visualization and finishing the piece has its own place but the most important part is working onsite and being in a state of constant inquiry with your piece.
work. in. progress.
Stories behind the door, is a journey of discovering the unraveling structures present around and to develop an artistic approach and style towards working in public spaces. The project started with working on The Peenya Metro Station, gathering and continuing the process in S10 community (settlement close to the Peenya Metro Station) ,Bombay, Yelahanka New Town and other sites as well. The last piece for this Project would not only be an accumulation of learning grasped from these varied interventions but also continuing the process and taking it to Peenya Metro Station.