Virtual Residency Day Six, Country vs City in India
I ran into an interesting problem today. I have been designing the part of my web site that will be used for this project and the top page includes four images. One image from each of the four sites I'm concentrating on. But I had no photographic images for the Delhi site.
After some thought, I decided to rely on conversations I had had with Navjot Altof. She is the wonderful Indian artist who first invited me to come participate at Khoj. She had had an installation in the Groundworks show we were both part of last year, in the Regina Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University. That installation showed her working with rural village women at their wells.
So I drew a sketch of what I imagined the women at the wells might look like for the web page and asked my friends there to correct the image. But then Rohini Devasher gently reminded me that the workshop was in the modern city of Delhi, not out in the "very rural outskirts of Rajasthan, Haryana or Punjab". So I realized I had to clarify why I made that choice and justify it.
After some more thought, I wrote my friends there that, "I am interested in the Indigenous relationships to resources because they are often regional benchmark predictors of both trouble and solutions, " which is exactly true.
Ravi Agarwal wrote back:
"I think that the dilemma is that while we depend, we do not realize that we do. So we are destroying what we cannot see…. Most people in Delhi for example have not even seen the river, or know that everytime they waste water it is something collected over centuries underground. We only seem to consume. This is most true in a city like Delhi. Here the image is more of women queuing up outside a water tanker or a municipal tap to fill water, for all wells are now owned by private bottling companies! …Maybe somewhere, we must recover our basic connections. That is what I think. Our ecological connections. From being consumers to back to being human beings who are fragile and vulnerable and will revert to nature one day, but seem to behave as if this is not so. "
So I have the first gift, from the first little problem of this residency now: a riddle to solve about this particular relationship between the country and the city, the invisible river there, life and death.
Does this also mean one reason we have global warming is a denial of our fragility and inevitable death?
After some thought, I decided to rely on conversations I had had with Navjot Altof. She is the wonderful Indian artist who first invited me to come participate at Khoj. She had had an installation in the Groundworks show we were both part of last year, in the Regina Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University. That installation showed her working with rural village women at their wells.
So I drew a sketch of what I imagined the women at the wells might look like for the web page and asked my friends there to correct the image. But then Rohini Devasher gently reminded me that the workshop was in the modern city of Delhi, not out in the "very rural outskirts of Rajasthan, Haryana or Punjab". So I realized I had to clarify why I made that choice and justify it.
After some more thought, I wrote my friends there that, "I am interested in the Indigenous relationships to resources because they are often regional benchmark predictors of both trouble and solutions, " which is exactly true.
Ravi Agarwal wrote back:
"I think that the dilemma is that while we depend, we do not realize that we do. So we are destroying what we cannot see…. Most people in Delhi for example have not even seen the river, or know that everytime they waste water it is something collected over centuries underground. We only seem to consume. This is most true in a city like Delhi. Here the image is more of women queuing up outside a water tanker or a municipal tap to fill water, for all wells are now owned by private bottling companies! …Maybe somewhere, we must recover our basic connections. That is what I think. Our ecological connections. From being consumers to back to being human beings who are fragile and vulnerable and will revert to nature one day, but seem to behave as if this is not so. "
So I have the first gift, from the first little problem of this residency now: a riddle to solve about this particular relationship between the country and the city, the invisible river there, life and death.
Does this also mean one reason we have global warming is a denial of our fragility and inevitable death?
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