Art in Transit Veda Thozhur Kolleri
Rewriting this document for the third time, I would hope that what follows are insights, ideas and opinions that I will not feel forced to discard too soon, after a real and sustained engagement with my site at the Peenya Metro Station.
When I started this project, I had just finished one at Rex, a single screen cinema in the city that will soon be replaced by a multiplex. The employees at the theatre have been working here for decades, and their relationship with the theatre through their colleagues was something that made me want to reiterate the kind of relationships that are only built over time by using portraits to establish relationships with them. Over the course of this project, I realised that I had been particularly interested in having my work demand an interaction with people such that it directly influences the nature of my work. This naturally led me to work on a project in Peenya, through which I thought that I could extend my interest in people and possibly identify patterns in people and the spaces that they occupy.
At the start of this project, while I was looking for where I could begin, I located the neighbourhood adjacent to the metro station where a row of houses had been demolished for the construction of the metro tracks. I thought that I could use this neighbourhood as an anchor through which to understand Peenya. I began determined that I would use drawing as a way to understand the space and the people that lived there.
It was through drawing in these spaces regularly that people grew curious about what I was doing and began to approach me. As I became familiar to them, and them to me, I started to allow their interactions with me seep into my process wherein they would tell me to draw their children, or to give them some of my drawings.
Although I was sure that I did not want speak of people so literally, through their portraits, avoiding this was more a resistance of portraiture than a genuine casting aside of the form. I still did not know how I would communicate what I wanted to, but I was attempting to discard a form that I was familiar with. Having realised this, I thought that I should follow a process that combined external cues with my own personal leanings, and let this process direct me towards an end, if at all.
This is how my process began, where I started drawing portraits of the people in the neighbourhood on request, following which I began giving them away. This was a gesture that I found challenging at the start, because I had never parted with my drawings so easily. Giving these drawings away began as an obligation, where I wanted to sustain a relationship with them, but gradually became central to my process. As I grew familiar with the people, it was easier for me to part with my drawings. I started drawing on a larger scale, and also stuck them on the walls of the spaces in which I made these drawings. Having established a comfortable space for myself within the neighbourhood, I felt it was safe to introduce my own agency to my process, and began to draw spaces rather than people.
Since I was comfortable within this space, and giving my drawings away had become easy, I decided to draw directly on these walls with chalk and charcoal, and I did this with permission.
The ease with which I was able to seek permission was something that troubled me. I felt that my initial curiosity towards this space rested on the fact that the front row of houses of the neighbourhood had been broken down, and it was this that I was looking to investigate when I began to interact with the people there. The people I had come to know seemed unperturbed by it, and I felt that if I were to represent people within the station, I would have to know why I’m choosing certain people over others. Why the people of this neighbourhood? Are they representative of Peenya? What about them did I want to represent? Is it really my place to represent people or was this something I wanted to be able to do? I did not want to force any assumptions upon them or this subject, and so I felt the need to move to a new space.
I continued my process into the metro station where I drew portraits of the guards on the walls of the station. I had never drawn at this scale before, nor had I spent so much time drawing portraits from life.
It was through the act of drawing portraits of strangers that I grew conscious of us (myself and my subjects) having to let go of our feelings of vulnerability in order to be able to sit through these drawing sessions that involved extended periods of eye contact.
I wanted to revisit my conversations with the guards and layer the existing portraits with these conversations as traces or residues of our exchanges. I was however more preoccupied with the idea of vulnerability, because it was what I had to let go of in order to sustain my process up to this point. This feeling is one that is central to all our interactions with one another, and I felt that having experienced it so strongly within my process, it would be a more honest subject to work around, as opposed to playing the role of representing people without really knowing how or why.
I took these thoughts about vulnerability to a wall in SFS, the neighbourhood I live in. I was viewing this physical wall as representative of the walls that we build around ourselves, and I drew on it everything that it hid, as if to bring the wall down, and to question the need for such walls. It was through this mural that I realised that working in public spaces did not necessarily need to borrow reason to exist so literally from the place, and that I could present preoccupations that one experiences through a physical occupation of place as collective preoccupations and allow this to find its own relevance within the space.
When I recently re-visited this piece, I found that the house had been painted again, but my wall had been left untouched. When I’d worked on the piece, its walls were green, but the house has now been repainted white. The repainting of the house has transformed this mural to represent, for me, a memory of what this house once was, and appears almost as a memory that is frozen in time.
Having spent a semester working in Peenya, and allowing my experiences here to culminate on a wall in SFS, I felt that what might further my understanding of working in public spaces would be to occupy more spaces outside Peenya.
I resumed this process of using drawing to better acquaint myself with spaces, and spent some time in a bus depot. My approach at this stage was more towards sharpening my abilities to respond to site, as opposed to that of working towards an idea. I was trying to view these spaces separately but I also wanted to be able to draw connections across these sites.
Although I did not know why I was choosing the spaces that I was choosing, they came to me instinctively and I went with these instincts. I first went to a bus depot. I expected to find a crowd here, but since there wasn’t one, I began to notice what the space stood for; for the people that were likely to occupy it. While I was making notes, I realised that the bus depot was a structure that rested on the notion of time, and that it wasn’t for its physical structure that it existed, but for a world that understood time as linear – between being early, on time, or late – and this was all that this space was.
Through occupying spaces that were likely to be populated with people, I felt that I could force myself to generate ideas by filtering my drawings and notes, and move closer towards a mode of expression that came naturally to me.
I then went to a local fair that I once again hoped would be crowded. It was full of people, and what marked this space for me was the movement of the crowd within the space. Since I was at a phase where I was subconsciously coding spaces through time, I felt that the fair, in contrast to the bus depot, was a space that attempted to freeze time, since it functions as a space for amusement. Through my drawings, I tried to capture the movement that occurred within the space, of both the crowds and the devices that lured these crowds.
On my way to the fair, I had noticed a construction site, and I thought that this could be my next stop. What drew me to this space was its stillness, because of how its transformation would only be visible over a longer duration of time. While I was here, I drew what I saw around me. After having run out of paper, I looked at my drawings, and realised that they could be re-arranged to form a narrative that would reveal how the space was likely to transform with construction. I stuck these drawings on the wall there, and only returned months later, to find the building almost fully constructed and transformed.
At this point in my process, I felt like the drawing in my sketchbook had become redundant, and there were some elements that I had drawn too many times. I felt the desperate need to arrive at a form, and so I tried to recompose some of these elements to form compositions.
These compositions led me to the idea of looking at smaller parts to a whole, where I wanted to zoom in on some elements and have them speak of something outside of themselves; of structures, power, repetition and authority.
I then went to two sites over a day, Cubbon Park and Brigade Road, where I defined one through the other. Cubbon Park, in comparison to Brigade Road, seemed to me like a simulated environment, that acts as a vacuum where people replace our current reality with a silence that they have forgotten how to use.
I realised that I was able to generate ideas within these spaces, but I had not attempted to express them yet, and this made me anxious.
We went to Bombay, where we were to work at what then seemed to me an unrealistic pace on an unrealistically large scale. Since we had to attack the space with ideas in a very short period of time, I found myself creating associations with Peenya and other urban spaces. This method of association helped me feel confident about being able to understand as much as I could about the area in very little time. A developing area in Kandivili, Samta Nagar seemed familiar, with its cranes, skyscrapers and other repetitive structures. It looked to me like a landscape that was predictable, and that could be completed with a few straight lines in repetition. It seemed to me like this whole space sustained itself through repetition.
I located four walls that made the rear faรงade of some old houses. They were temporary homes for people who were waiting for their large apartment complexes to be built. Since tall buildings surrounded these small flats, what seemed missing on this rear faรงade were the measured, square windows that made up the tall buildings. I used charcoal and paint to impose these windows on the wall, and through the three days that I worked there, I began to view my role as one that was performative. I felt as if I was playing the part of those who impose structure upon urban landscapes.
Following this intervention in Bombay, I realised that what made it possible for me to respond to the space within such a short duration of time was my past engagement with public spaces. What I really needed to arrive at my form here was a template on which to work; the template that is the space within which the site exists. My intervention here gave me the assurance I needed to realise that I was on my way to learning to find ways to communicate my preoccupations through a form that was informed by my drawing.
I then returned to SFS, where I worked on a collaborative piece with my classmate Fabrice. We worked around a shed in a park in the neighbourhood. Since he works with colour, and I, at the time, was working with black and white, we represented the neighbourhood as being punctuated by characters of colour that represented the park. We began our piece after a conversation on how people require designated spaces, and designated periods of time, in the form of zones (like this park) in order to enjoy themselves. This piece was to act as a revelatory commentary of this notion of enjoyment as something that has to be forcefully acted out.
After having reached half way around the shed, I felt that my image and my medium had become too redundant. I wanted to use colour in the other half, which was also the side of the park that wasn’t being used. I thought that colour would activate this space by giving the space an atmosphere that would make this side of the park more accessible. I continued drawing houses along this side of the park, but I painted them in colour. I derived my palette from the houses around me.
I felt that using colour allowed me more control over what I wanted the piece to evoke, and it permitted a very different dialogue with people who came across this section, where suddenly they would respond to individual elements, like the windows, that characterized the houses. I found this interesting wherein it was as if people’s preferences were reflective of their personalities, and I felt that an engagement of this nature with my viewers offered me many more possibilities with regard to communicating my preoccupations in public spaces.
Collaborating with Fabrice (whose images are filled with colour) must have contributed to my sudden fascination for colour. I felt very strongly about using colour for my piece in Peenya to gain more control over the kind of atmosphere I wanted to work with. So I returned to Peenya with my sketchbook, and located the stretch of wall along the entrance as the site at which I wanted to work.
I made a series of drawings of the site in order to figure out how I could approach this space. After Bombay, my preoccupation with structures had grown, and the large windows that occupied a large part of this stretch of wall reminded me of the vastness of everything in Peenya and other such urban landscapes. After a week and a half of drawing whatever I noticed on site, I thought that I could work with the windows by using them as part of my composition, because they were all I saw on each section of the wall.
I then decided to work off site and create a small body of work around the form of the windows of my site. I began by using just the form, independent of site, and made geometric forms around them. As I was making these drawings, I realised that what I wanted to do with the space, was to interrupt its straight lines with straight lines, in a way that would use the language of the space to confuse the space. I have always felt uncomfortable around structures like this one because they assume an authority that dictates the landscape of the space, making it seem hostile. It was because of this that I felt like I wanted to use the same straight lines to interrupt the dimensions of the vast wall and its windows. After having arrived at this thought, I made drawings of one section of the wall, and worked around the windows. These drawings were to act as practice for the kind of responses I would form while on site.
Having made conceptual drawings of what I wanted to do in Peenya, it wasn’t as much of a challenge for me to make my first mark on the wall. I realised that working on paper was actually harder than on site, since paper is flat, and I needed to evoke dimensions through my drawings on paper.
The site offered me multiple surfaces on which to work, and since I had made these drawings on the flatness of paper, it was overwhelming to work with the 3-dimensional wall and floor surfaces. Initially, this made it hard for me to hold my ideas back, and I began to fill the surfaces too much.
I spent two weeks on the first section, and towards the end of it, I felt like I had moved too far away from what I had begun with. I realised that in being overwhelmed by the site, I was introducing too many elements that didn’t necessarily fit the space. It did however help me create a graphic language for this piece, where I used masking tape for my straight lines. It offered me a lot of possibility with regard to symbolizing the Window, which I wanted to represent with what was to me the most striking part of it – its lines.
Moving towards the next section, I wanted to employ a different strategy where I wanted to curtail my responses in form and number. I exposed the stairs behind the wall, but I did this to speak of imitation as much as exposure. Since I was working with stairs that were behind the wall, I had to work with measurements, because of which it took me three days to finally make the drawing on the wall.
I initially thought that I would render the stairs as they were behind the wall, but in keeping with this urge to curtail my responses, I chose to use a flat white to represent it.
The stairs directly below the windows adopt the texture of the windows to conjure a sense of continuity.
On the part that continues as the reflective glass of the window, I’ve painted the lamppost that is across the road from the wall. This works as both, a reflection of the lamppost on glass and as its shadow. Surrounding this, I’ve made coloured shapes that represent the light that I see through the windows inside the station after splitting it.
Prior to working on the painted window in this section, I began to feel indifferent towards this section because I was merely painting whatever was behind it and allowed myself very little freedom with it. I felt like I was working too slowly because I was imitating what was behind the wall. I was also afraid that I had begun to work with a formula, which was suddenly making it much easier for me to approach the wall. It was this ease that bored me, and this boredom that was slowing me down. I also realised that I was not viewing the whole stretch of wall as one. I was treading too carefully by moving through it one step at a time. So I decided to assess the whole wall, and prime sections for which I had ideas so that I could move back and forth across these different ‘sections’ that I had demarcated for myself.
This move that seemed radical at the time, gave me multiple ideas to work out the painted window in the section with the stairs. I realised that since I had invented this window, I could allow myself the freedom to disrupt the logic of this section and simultaneously expand it. I painted a form inside the window in shades of grey and white, and extended it below the window in colour. While working on this, I thought I could create stairs at an angle above and below the real window.
I was thinking about having colour represent the freedom I felt when I wasn’t imitating what was behind the wall.
This section came to represent itself in whites and greys where I would abide by the rules, and colour at places where I would stretch these rules.
I worked between different sections after having overcome my boredom, and I realised that what I had mistaken for a formula, was actually something positive, wherein I finally had assumed ownership of this space. This sense of ownership came after five weeks of working on site, and it is what has helped me build up a momentum to know that I can see this piece through. I have developed a comfort with the graphic language of this piece, and a familiarity with the space and the people who see me paint everyday, and this has made me evolve ideas with more ease.
I had begun this piece uncertain of how I will cover the whole area, but now, half way through the mural, I have some sense of what each of my moves could lead to. My concerns have moved from being unsure of whether this piece will evoke what I want it to, to ensuring that I’m conscious of the decisions I make. Despite working primarily with instinct, this consciousness, whether current or delayed is what would mark, for me, the success of anything that I do. I’ve realised that since I’m working with instinct, I am never sure of what my image will be until it is executed, and it is only through execution that I develop this consciousness. The image matters to me at the level of whether or not its presence will be experienced by people who come in contact with it, but it is always my consciousness that I would place as central to my practice.
After almost a year-long engagement with public spaces, I have noticed that my position has consistently shifted. Soon after I acknowledge maintaining a particular position, I begin to move towards another. I view this acknowledgment as essential to my growth and to my practice. This document is what I would like to use to remind myself of the positions I once held, in order to be able to trace my decisions back to how and where I began.