Art in transit 2015
Fabrice GROLAIRE Documentation book
Summary
1 Introduction Background Why Art in Transit ?
6 Collaborating to enter the space Wall painting: 2 students, 1 park Collaborating to enter a space
2 Site: Peenya Metro Station Discovering Peenya Area Global site sketches
7 Getting back to source Iterating with characters
3 Source: The Peenya scrapyard Site sketches Relation between site and source 4 Storytelling through characters First concept idea 5 Mumbai, a process oriented trip « Life behind the wall » « The women holding windows » « Look at the sky »
8 Understanding site possibilities Wall sketches 9 Intensive character creation 3 rounds of character designing From sketches to drawings Visualisations 10 Working on site 11 Final piece
Sum up
What is Art in Transit? Art in Transit is a 4th year project at Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology, based in Bangalore, India. The project began in mid 2014, when more than 30 students started their interventions in the Peenya metro station (Bangalore) through paintings, sculptures, books and performances. My project aims to redefine the spirit of the recently built Peenya station. This book details all the differents steps of my intervention.
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Background
A product design background
I graduated in 2013 from the Design School of Troyes (France) as a product designer. I worked mostly with DIY techniques and for my first diploma project, I started producing my own natural graffiti paint.
Doing graffiti and street art on the side At this point in time, graffiti and street art were only a hobby. I joined Srishti in 2014, where I continued doing product design. Art in Transit is, for me, a kickstarter project through which I can explore my passion for painting walls.
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Why AIT?
Previous experience in graffiti
> Since I explored graffiti on the side, I had some skill in painting.
Previous experience with art in public space
> I’d engaged with it casually, but never in an official way.
The metro station
> I thought this space could be an official way to share my art!
Place artwork in a space people won’t expect
> This was a chance to create surprise by changing the atmosphere of a space.
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Discovering Peenya area Background
Discovering Peenya through storytelling Find 10 objects on the street, create a story with them. This simple exercise was my first encounter with Peenya. I took a walk around Peenya, observed, and picked up 10 interesting objects to create stories with. That’s how a BSNL boundary stone became the gravestone of an unknown officer, a gas cylinder became a vessel that could take people into outer space, and a helmet became a flower pot.
Outcomes: The exercise gave me knowledge of the context of Peenya’s community. It introduced me to new sites in Peenya: an abandoned blade factory, abandoned watch factory, passageways, etc. Through the exercise, I could create a basic metaphoric representation of Peenya and its community. It also kindled my interest in one specific site: The scrapyard.
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Site: Peenya metro station Background
Discovering Peenya metro station Sketches of the station I like to understand the context of a site before an intervention. Sketching is one way to understand architecture and landscape but also a way to spend a little time in the space. Listening to the sounds, the conversations and the atmospheres taught me a lot about the metro station. I started color coding the metro station, highlighting the walls.
Outcomes : Sketching gave me initial ideas regarding locations for my final art piece. I was able to clarify and represent my vision of the station. It also served as a guildeline for graphic styles for my future exercises.
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Source: The Scrapyard
Collecting information and stimuli Sketching the scrapyard area The atmosphere of the Peenya scrapyard reminded me of the kinds of spaces in which I used to do graffiti in France. The metro station is now in use and the scrapyard is abandoned. I thought there was a worthy story to tell regarding this. Sketching the objects in the scrapyard helped me understand what kinds of activities happened there; the leftover pieces and residues enabled me to imagine the histories of these objects.
Outcomes : Through this exercise, I was able to find the basis of my context: the link between the scrapyard and the Peenya metro station.
Site and source relation
Determining the relationship between site and source Site: The Peenya metro station Source: The Scrapyard The scrapyard has enabled the construction of the metro. In fact, the scrapyard was only created in order to make the birth of the metro station possible. Now, however, this ‘baby’ is alive and the scrapyard is ‘dead’. The relationship between ‘creature-creator’ is, for me, the link between the two places. Is there a cycle of birth and death for every new construction? How could I connect these two spaces? The main objective was to reanimate the now dormant scrapyard and give it its place in the metro station.
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Storytelling through characters
Humanising shapes Transforming objects into characters. In my sketches, I added eyes to the shapes and forms I encountered in the scrapyard. Folowing instinct, I either focussed on representing single objects or clusters of objects. In fact I had this idea when one of my friends tried to sketch the scrapyard using his own skills! The two sketches you see on the left are his, and the ones on the next spread are mine.
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Experimenting with photography
Using photography as a medium Using photo collages to create characters. I photographed site specific elements in the scrapyard and assembled the pictures to loosely create shapes of different characters. Turning each picture black and white helped me put together all the elements required to create robotic characters.
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Mumbai: A process-oriented trip
Honing my ability to respond to site
Paint, paint and paint again. The Art in Transit class was invited to Mumbai by Urban Vision, to participate in a week-long street art charrette, creating murals for a street in Kandivali. This gave me the opportunity to realise three short pieces. I worked through these interventions to build my capacity (painting skills, understanding of context, sharpening response to site).
Application keywords: 6 days. 3 walls.
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Life behind the wall
Meeting the inhabitants of Kandivali Kandivali is a redeveloping area. Buildings are demolished and constructed, life keeps changing according to the rhythm of the city. Through this painting, my goal was to acknowledge the life of the inhabitants of Kandivali. I wanted to give the walls faces - faces of the people living behind those same walls. So I selected one set of apartments and asked a few people living there if I could paint their caricatures on their walls.
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Paint makes walls stronger
The lady holding the windows I wanted this painting to interact with the wall and the other architectural elements around it. Focusing on the material-immaterial relationship, I tried to convey the idea that something as dimensionless and ephemeral as paint could make something as tangible as walls stronger.
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Look at the sky...
Look at the sky People are always looking at their feet when they walk on the street. I suppose it is because it makes us confident about our direction in life. Through this painting, my goal was to encourage people to change the direction in which they look. Have you ever gotten lost in the blue of the sky? This is actually where a lot of people find the answers to their everyday questions, so I wished to make a mural that encouraged people to look up at the sky.
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2 Students, 1 Park 2 Students 1 Park
A collaborative painting Collaborating with a classmate to intervene in one of the parks in SFS colony (Yelahanka New Town) allowed me to share with another person the way in which I perceived spaces. My collaborator, Veda Kolleri, helped me see this park as an open space. This park is a well designed area, where children feel uninhibited and do things they wouldn’t allow themselves to do at home. In the mural Veda and I made, the park is personified as large colourful characters, surrounded by houses. We played with contrast and saturation (using sombre tones for the buildings and bright hues for the characters) to convey the idea that the park is a free space for the mind.
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Getting back to source
Rediscovering source Revisiting my source became a necessity after such a long processoriented trip. I could enter the Peenya scrapyard with a fresh mind and a new approach to the space. I started assembling scrap objects in the scrapyard through sketches to create complex characters. It was then time to leave the sketches behind and move on to making refined drawings, for which I used the informatic tool to complete clean detailed drawings of these characters.
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A metaphoric migration
Animating the Inanimate My goal is to animate the inanimate residues from the Peenya scrapyard. In the form of a large scale mural at the station, I would like to offer these residues a metaphoric migration to the place they were originally intended for.
From sketch to drawing
A long way to the final visualisation All my life, my biggest weakness in painting and drawing has been my inability to create a final clean detailed visualisation of my idea before beginning the final piece onsite. I wanted my final mural to go according to a definite plan, so as not to leave too much space for onsite improvisation and to help me control the quality of my work. The next few pages will show you the process I used to move from rough sketches to refined visualisations.
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Understanding site
The opportunity to understand walls Acquainting myself with my site was an important step in my journey towards a complete visualisation. It was by sketching and photographing the wall that I understood the architecture that would eventually serve as a guide for my characters. I studied the shapes and perspectives of the site until I almost knew it by heart.
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Intensive characterisation process
3 rounds to design the characters After finalizing upon a rough composition of all my characters (which you see on the left), I drew each of my characters 3 times in order to push my skills and select the most suitable images for the walls. The first two rounds were made on tracing paper, so as to train myself to adapt to the shapes and perspectives of the walls. The last round of drawing was done on A1 paper, to get accustomed to drawing large scale murals.
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Visualisations
Using the computer to finalise the visualisation I then moved my drawings onto the computer. Adobe Illustrator was required to choose the right colors for my characters and prepare a paint budget for the spray cans I would be using to make the final piece. The colors and shapes used in the background are my graphic interpretation of the scrapyard’s ambience.
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Work in progress...