‘Engaged Media’ meets ‘Art in Transit’
Mechthild Schmidt Feist, Bangalore + New York, March 2020
Arriving in Bangalore, at Srishti, at Art in Transit
December 14, 2019. I will meet Arzu at the Cubbon Park subway station to see her team’s Art in Transit mural in progress. A good chance to get used to ordering my Ola cab. Traffic is horrendous. My mouth has a layer of dust + fumes. I marvel at the occasional cow on the highway.
But let me retrace + draw a not so straight line from Fulbright, via New York University to USIEF and Srishti to Arzu. Fulbright is a US academic exchange program promoting global cultural understanding. In India, it is partnered with USIEF. (Note to you, the readers: also Indian students and academics can apply for a grant to the USA. check it out!)
I am a Media Artist and professor at New York University. As a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar, I will spend 5 months to continue work on my ‘Engaged Media — Building Culturally And Locally Sensitive Environmental Awareness’. My practice-based advocacy uses media art in local grassroots projects to convey the urgency to act on climate change.
In my search to find a likeminded university in India, I found Srishti, a creative beehive where sustainability is woven into all the arts. And then I found a TED talk by Arzu Mistry whose energy and Art in Transit concept so convinced me that that was the place where I wanted to work. Arzu is an artist and Creative Education faculty at Shrishti. She is also the co-founder of the above-mentioned Bangalore Public Art series ‘Art in Transit’. Dean Pithamber Polsani’s ‘Radical City’ conference in December brought me to Bangalore early, in time to also attend the many presentations of the ‘Interim’ workshop.
And that is why on that December day I stood in terrible traffic and looked a cow in the eye to see the last touches of one of the Srishti group projects at the Cubbon Park metro station. Like all Art in Transit projects, this is public art translating a complex problem into striking visuals. The 80-foot mud mural illustrates old rainwater harvesting techniques that are being revived in the face of an imminent water crisis. The work is described in more detail on the December post on this site.
Engaged Media research and Indian grassroots ecological projects
My prior media projects were aimed at a US-Euro specific audience and its environmental and social problems. I was addressing fossil fuels (Fossil Free), Climate and conflict refugees (Involuntary Journeys), and most of all, overconsumption (L.E.S.S. of Everything — Esthetics of Sharing and Sustainability) in public projections, installations, and animations.
My project in India will respond to and be inspired by local concerns and initiatives. I had read about projects that I wanted to visit in person — and learned of many more during my stay. I start with field research on a variety of Indian grass-root projects, exhibits, and talks. They range from sustainable architecture to foraging on an organic farm and reforesting in Auroville to Barefoot College near Jaipur that combines women’s empowerment with solar electrification in remote villages. (If you are interested, there is more on the linked blog above)
To get an insight into other classes Manjari Singh, an amazingly supportive Srishti colleague introduces me to many of the faculty.
Subsequently, we have long meetings, I am invited to several presentations and to conduct Masterclasses with two other faculty. I present ‘Outsourcing Culture’ in KumKum’s ‘Decolonizing Design’ class — and ‘L.E.S.S.’ in a Film Art class with Vasanthi Dass.
Lalbagh, the station, the trees, the garden, the historians — a concept develops
Rewind to the start of FEBRUARY, which is dominated by further research and narrowing down my topic to a tangible project around the Lalbagh Botanical Garden metro station where Arzu’s March class will meet to develop more Art in Transit artworks. Arzu and I keep meeting and go on a scouting trip to a nearby village. We visit Shuresh Samuha — whose Sarjapur Curries art project tries to preserve traditional planted and foraged curry ingredients by local farmers.
Brainstorming, Arzu uses the concept of ‘Living Libraries Lab’. Foraging+ collections. Making the invisible visible. She teaches a mixed group of artists and creative education students and demonstrates hands-on practice to introduce her class to the concept. Her main brainstorming and artistic device are accordion books combining drawings, associated notes, cutouts, folding pockets for objects.
I am looking to visualize the concept of human relation to nature. How can we relearn a love of nature, a relationship with nature that we slowly lost over the last generations? What single species can make this relationship visible? I chose the tree, looking to create empathy with new visual angles + attention to the mundane, moving from the head to the eye to the heart.
I go on several walks inside the Lalbagh Garden, some alone, some with Arzu and her team, one later in March with the whole class of 25. Two walks are guided by excellent locals — and in typical Bangalore fashion start right after sunrise.
Suresh Jayaram is the founder of the 1Shanthiroad Gallery and a descendent from the Thigala nursery community next to Lalbagh. He is a walking encyclopedia and points us to special flowering trees, their exotic origins, symbiotic relationships between trees — birds — insects — and yes, humans. I leave with hundreds of photos. Some of them you’ll find here some will be part of my TREE animation. This is a scouting expedition with others from the Art-in-Transit team. Aside from Arzu, Suresh, and me, there are Anna Jacob, a researcher/psychologist, and the sculptor Yash Bhandari.
About 2 weeks later the 5-week class is well underway. So, it is Thursday, March 12 at 7:30 am — when a faint breeze and fresh air enhance the guided Lalbagh walk with Vijay Thiruvadi. He is a retired executive and very learned gentleman, part local historian, part botanist who takes us back to Lalbagh origins in Moghul times. Some of the Muslim garden layout is still preserved. About 2000 tree species are in Lalbagh, some as import experiments for cash crops, others representing the 19th-century natural science expeditions traveling from the Pacific to London Kew Gardens, and back to India. Referring to our theme of ‘Living Libraries’ these exotic collections resemble a ‘Zoo for trees’. We collect leaves + photos, facts, and anecdotes.
Four hours later we end the morning for the famed LMR lunch. I am so glad to reciprocate and invite the whole gang. Little did I know I would not have the chance to do it later…In the afternoon some students are interested to learn more about my work inside Google Earth, others in animating type. I give a talk to explain my work process and invite collaborations for the coming week.
TREESTORY — projected and mapped … and interrupted
I return to the premise of our relationship with and estrangement from nature — as city dwellers, as humans at the end of centuries’ long quests to subjugate nature — rather than to cohabitate the planet as equals. Who gave us humans the right to decide over survival of other species, ignorant of the interconnectedness of human life with plant and animal life? In our fixation on economic growth, a tree is marketable wood, plants are cash crops or weeds. The ‘work’ of plants and animals is unaccounted for, such as absorbing CO2 or pollinating our plants.
Lalbagh is a Living Library of protected trees, labeled and cared for. Outside the perimeter wall are 19th century Lalbagh director Krumbiegel’s avenue trees, planted in beautiful orchestration of sequential blooming. The trees now are in a precipitous state as traffic increases and roads widen. Some are literally in the road, asphalt up to their roots.
Many are deprived of air, tree pits filled with garbage, trunks full of staples from flyers, used for coils of electric cables — but a few are shrines, some are watered with small plants around them by caring citizens. Protests have saved the razing of some trees. I hope to contribute and encourage more people to care.
If trees could talk our language, what would be their history, their story, their TREESTORY? We know trees communicate via roots, bacteria, fungi. The Lalbagh metro windows overlook that border between garden and street. Just inside the park are two large trees. Their branches reach out to each other. Do they talk? Do they have a common history with trees along the street?
TREESTORY will be the communication between these three trees, a physical installation with a layered projected animation using the silhouettes of those branches — imagining words, imagining their history.
A second projection will be an interactive view of the Lalbagh area on Google Earth. (above) Participants can find map interventions of text and images while exploring the history timeline to see the changing tree cover over the past 20 years. The file is also accessible on any computer. Download <Lalbagh_TREESTORY.kmz> + open it in Google Earth to see the timeline with my text and image overlays. Feel free to add your story and share!
I test projections onto a station staircase and on an assortment of semi-transparent fabric layers moving in the slight breeze. Metro passengers will be invited to participate by adding comments on hanging paper strips or a connected website. The layers will give density to the animation and projection — much like a canopy. Can the stories connect us to a tree, stop indifference — if for a day? The Thursday afternoon tests with sample fabrics look good.
Yash and Anna have set up a table with leaves, bark, seeds along with a digital microscope hooked to a projector. A beautiful way to make us look at nature in a different way. Ideas float with great momentum.
But things take a different turn. One could say that nature intervened. All projects change from public to online spaces. The Corona virus crisis cuts short my India stay by 7 weeks — and like everyone in the project, I continue from home.
This mock-up illustrates the metro installation. (above) I will post the animation on my site in a few weeks, and maybe the installation can still happen at a later time, in collaboration with the Art in Transit Team.
The animation will continue the visual language of my earlier L.E.S.S. project, interweaving animated imagery, and typography.
For now, we connect on WhatsApp and Zoom. This reminds me of Arzu’s icebreaker exercise on the first workshop day. Standing in a circle, a large ball of wool was thrown to each person for an introduction until a woolen network connected all of us.
Those strings now reach halfway around the world.
Mechthild S. Feist
-MechthildSchmidtFeist.com
