ANATOMY OF LAND: …from soil to soil…brick to brick…dust to dust…:
A conversive architectural installation as part of the Curation Turning the Wheel curated by Vidya Sivadas as part of Serendipity Arts Festival, 2023
Chaad Petanor Gaan( Roof Make'rs Song)
This project is a three ways conversation between landscape study, soil and architecture…and expression of labour of a lost tradition. This project is also an extension of a long practice based collaboration with 10 Bauri women from Mohammad Bazar ( Durga Bauri, Pari Bauri, Astami Bauri, China bauri, Koti Bauri, Jyotsna Bauri,Mongli Bauri, Santi Bauri, Suksari Bauri, Tulsi Bauri) who used to make brick dust roofs by hitting the roof manually. This project is also a pedagogic collaboration of learning , making and working together with Leto poet Hara Kumar Gupta, traditional mason Sheikh Asmat Ali and students of Kala Bhavana( Surajit Mudi, Dhiraj Rabha).
W J Mitchel in his Introduction to the book Landscape and Power referred landscape as a verb, a critical site of multiple encounter. “Landscape we suggest, does not signify or symbolize power relations, it is an instrument of cultural power perhaps even an agent of power that is( or frequently represents itself as) independent of human intensions.”
Introduction to the book Landscape and Power edited by W J Mitchell
History of modernism in India also starts from an occupation and engagement with land .Rabindranath Tagore situated modernity as an institutional engagement with a specific landscape to propose a modernism that is not a break away from tradition but a direct engagement with nature and reengage with the self in a conversation with a changing landscape. Architecture became a tool towards a wholistic encounter. The idea of eclecticism in conversation with the local landscape of khoai, the red landscape of laterite soil, towards an integrated practice of living and becoming, living and experiencing, living and making in a communitarian way of individual and collective coexistence. In the process it engaged with the notion of labour as an integral part of making and an encounter of shared knowledge.
Art or Aesthetic activity has always been referred to as labour of excess and as such do not fall under the labour law . Even within that there are categorization of labour and often certain forms of labour are not included in the main practice of art. Often these marginal forms of expressions remain unregistered forms of labour in the elitist state of art. This present encounter is an engagement with a form of labour and its expression that lay invisible in the history of art and culture and specifically the way Santiniketan modernity has been constituted through time. Taogre made the school and the art school in Santiniketan by occupying a piece of land in khoai( Birbhum, land of red laterite soil) that is a fringe landscape with surfaces receding and eroding everyday...so there is a phenomenon of loss and rejuvenation in the history of modernism in India...in between is the history of the roof makers songs the unregistered labour of making of the roof...and there is the larger existence of the scheduled caste communities in Birbhum , 75% of the overall SC communities resides in Birbhum.This project transformed the long tradition of landscape painting in Santiniketan..the panoramic picturesque representation into an interdisciplinary, critical engagement with the Anatomy of the Land itself from raw martial to transformation into bricks to dust again..only to reconfigure into the roofs....a metaphor of body and disintegration in itself...
Chhad Petanor Gaan is an expression of labour for making compressed brick dust roofs by hand . A group of scheduled caste women mostly Bauri community women of Birbhum , from Mohammad Bazar area used to sing these songs as they would bit up a roof for making it permanent in recent time some 35 years back. Lime mixed brick dust mortar was once an active material of architecture roof making which were laid by hitting the mortar repeatedly inside a space for a month or more depending on the size, by a group of women. These women were mostly from scheduled caste category. They would beat the surface until it is as hard as to break a bettle nut. As a practice they would hit and sing rhythmically with observations and expressions of everyday life, about power, love suffering, sexuality , self and social life style in general. This form of making of roof became an obsolete technique as concrete replaced the technique of roof making since late 60’s.
Most of the houses that were built in Santiniketan during the time of Tagore their roof were made by the women from local landscapes and mostly from scheduled caste communities. Most of the time these process went unnoticed and interestingly never incorporated in the practice of history writing in Santiniketan and also not included in the history of labour in the making of modernism in Kala Bhavana. Its only during 1940’s when Ernold Bake who visited Santiniketan and made vedio and sound recordings of the location documented some of the songs of the roof makers who were working in the making of the houses in the campus and neighbourhood at that time.
This project places these complex encounters around landscape transformation and dialogue in Santiniketan to reengage with the notion of modernity as a multilayered
phenomenon of multiple practices and engagement. It would attempt to map these disconnected expressions operating around similar domain of marginality and unregistered form of labour in relation to contemporary notion of land towards an imaginary collectivism of coexistence and reconcile labour as a declassified space of multilayered practice.
Tagore’s house made between 20s and 30s that reflect the eclecticism of collage like house making inspired from different styles...and carrying the invisible memory of the roof makers songs, as all the roof all the houses he made had the traditional roof making technique...another lost songs of labour and take this fragmented ideas of land and transformation into the civilizational history of human occupation with land and its transformation from soil to construction of ideology to the transforming state of disintegration into dust and to again reconstruct them as a state of Flux from one state to the other in a performative relationship....an interdisciplibary intersection of material..form..construction...to a transformation....and incorporate shift or change as the existential phenomenon of past and present where history is trapped in its own reconstruction...and unknown unregistered labour becomes the inherent entity of oppression and undetermined body...and songs become the only forms of registration and resistance... In the process the project will disrupt and deconstruct the anthropological viewpoint and representation into an intersection and crossection of land itself...
On one hand being specific to a landscape in this case Birbhum and the architectures of Tagore adopting to the features of the khoai lanscape and on the other running a parallel discourse of breaking and making by the roofmakers of Birbhum. A detailed mapping of the Birbhum soil sampling to an archival document of the Tagore architectures and the character of the khoi landscape to a detailed physical transformation of the roof making technique together with the faces of the roofmakers and fragments of the roofs they will make individually...and songs piercing through the materials...interspersed with the texts of other songs of baul tradition that refers to the soil and land and its existence beyond the civilizational authorship and ownership of land...Nothing will remain fixed...everybody will finally disintegrate into the soil as the baul says
Ekbar Matir Bhitore Hobey ghar re mone amar keno bandho dalan Ghar
( finally one will dwell inside the land, so why make a dalan( brick house)
So the first part of installation was an interdisciplinary pedagogical passage of multiple encounter of landscape mapping material census reports, design and architecture and landscape transformation and will reflect a poetic coexistence of land, landscape, architecture , institution and expressions of labour in modern age. The pedagogical site will also become a reading site of different aspects of Santiniketan architecture devised by Rabindrantha Tagore, Surendranath Kar and Nandalal Bose as a host to nurture Kala Bhavana early modernism and the eclectic spirit of Tagore’s vision of a world university, Visva Bharati.Viewers will engage with the expression of physical labour (personal agony, anger )of roof making songs together with landscape and architecture as a conversational site of form and physicality in relation to local landscape records reconstituted within a process of dearchiving .
The installation unfolded into a construction site of the different material process of traditional roof making layered with songs of roof making laid out into a network of
semiotics of making and the makers creating a fragmented space of absence and presence in relation to the notion of roof …from soil to soil, brick to brick, dust to dust. The installation will culminate into a final segment of a balcony whose floor will host fragments of a broken roof and architecture made from brick dust and lime collected from Goa. This project exemplified this phenomenon of disintegration to disrupt the whole practise of the picturesque and the aesthetic beauty of landscape to the fragmented entity of land in itself.... transforming the practise of fragment to analysis and engage with fragmentation as a metaphor of existence...the inevitable loss in the process of research...