Public Arts for Participatory Ecosystems

Artistic wisdom midwifes ecosystems. Insights from art, philosophy, history and other humanistic disciplines will all help us negotiate a turbulent 21st century. In this vein of participatory action, we present a social art project “Portrait of a nation”. Enit Maria, Madhavan Pillai and Srinivas Mangipudi embarked on a journey from the southern tip of India to its northern border, travelling around 16,000 kms over 60 days, resulting in an archive of 800+ collaborative portraits.

Find out more about the project here.

Philosophy and Art have had a long and complex relationship. Plato thought poets were bad influences, maybe because Aristophanes lampooned his guru, Socrates. His own writing is a model of creative prose. It’s a bit of a turf war, since Philosophy, Art, Literature and History compete for the ‘most authentic representation of humanity’ prize. Why bother with these old feuds when we need as much wisdom as we can get from poets, painters and professors?

Make art not war.?

The world is a complex dynamic place. There are sophisticated environments of work: in cities, in industrial neighbourhoods and pastoral landscapes with farms, fields and lakes, towns and villages. Cast an eye over vast coastlines that stretch for kilometres with empty unending beaches and turquoise blue waters, interspersed with ‘hotspots’ where fishermen are fighting corporations building large mega ports. There are dry parched barren lands where the winds blow hot and the only vegetation is thorny shrubs. Whatever little ground water is there, is so hard to surface that the people in these areas regularly fall sick by drinking it.

Forests so thick that light casts a diffuse shadow after it filters through the canopy. The tribals who lived in these lands forever have had to make way for tiger sanctuaries - charismatic megafauna facing extinction because of external human activity that reduces forest corridors to clumps of isolated environments. Craters that have been dug out for the minerals that run our world, powering our cars, phones and often our snacks. Huge mounds where the remains of our greed are dumped back.

Miles upon miles of farmland, some big some small. Some plots where many people are toiling on a small piece of land, while in others a few people with the aid of machines are making the land toil much more. Up toward the sky are mountains, where travelers snake up the windy road into passes where quick burst of harsh and changing weather conditions are a norm. Children like mountain goats are seen climbing even higher to go to school, and nutrition security is chai and maggi. Places so vast that it is impossible to explore everything and thus ignored and left behind.

All these places are dotted with human beings living in various conditions. Somewhere thick, somewhere thin, somewhere rich, somewhere poor, somewhere sick somewhere sound, somewhere square and somewhere round.

You get the idea.

What if we want to find out how people feel about this and that? How may we go about doing it? Just think about it for a moment… so many languages, so many truths, so many divides, so many realities, so many conditions, so many doors, so many worlds. Even unanimously uttering the phrase “we are in this together” is just not possible. It just does not translate equitably.

So how may we dream together? How can we listen to everyone and still be heard? How can collaborative action lead to collective learning? How may we all coexist and embrace everyone’s uniqueness? How can we capture contemporary truths with a pluralistic ethos??

"Art is the universal language of the human soul, and public art is a way to share that language with the world." - Yoko Ono

The physicist John Archibald Wheeler originated the notion of a “participatory” conscious universe, a cosmos in which all of us are embedded as co-creators, replacing the accepted universe “out there”, which is separate from us.?This note is about the practice of public arts as a participatory dialogue that has the power to mediate these varied inhabited realities.

Our canvas isn’t as big as the universe but it’s large enough to occupy our energies for several lifetimes. Find out more about the project here.

We were inspired by the prospect of seeing how the public imagines painting a portrait and what truths might that act reveal. We crisscrossed the nation, and making people paint collaborative portraits along the way. This experience was a very delicate act, albeit a transformative one that allows us to see ourselves through the eyes of everyone else.

And the idea of a nation, art, society, situation, access and such are made visible through a collaborative endeavour of creating portraits, that is simple enough to surmount age and other divides, yet a mighty one that can empower us and change the course of our collective future.

We facilitated 60+ paintings sessions with all age groups, in various places such as a public mandapam, fishermen and tribal villages, government & private schools, old age homes, orphanages and with special kids, with families in their homes, public parks, prison, art college etc. Over a thousand people have contributed to this archive,?opening a mirror onto our contemporary reality.?

Of what do these portraits speak? There are many emergent truths, some obvious to discern and others that get revealed only on closer re-readings, but instead of telling you what we think it’s best if the photos tell their own story. We leave you with some of the images from this project. Until next time.

Find out more about the project: Portrait of a Nation

The Gallery Of Imaginary Objects

This speculative 3D printer for adobe buildings requires a high level of coordination which is achieved through songs. The team moves as one as they all sing together.

As we work together, our voices unite,

Creating a symphony of sound and light,

And as the city grows, our melodies will hum,

Our songs etched in every brick and plumb.

- AI assisted words