Interview with vasudha Thozhur

Baroda based artist Vasudha Thozhur has been actively involved in a community art project, The Himmat Workshops, since 2002. The workshops are collaborative in nature and have the support of practitioners from different disciplines. It addresses a range of issues like violence, displacement, personal loss, rehabilitation and relocation. It involves a group of girls who lost members of their families in the carnage at Naroda Patiya, Ahmedabad on February 28, 2002. The community was re-located at Faizal Park, Vatva, and the workshops took place at the community center in Mayur Park, set up by Monica Wahi and Zaid Ahmed Shaikh. The girls made paintings, quilts, wall scrolls and also shot videos which were documentary in nature. They represent an individual story as a collective voice on the one hand and on the other a collective voice as an individual experience. These paintings and videos bring about the possibility of women claiming status as speaking subjects, talking about their lives after a particularly violent upheaval. Often one emphasizes art as a cathartic healer of collective trauma. In the wake of such uncertain and volatile situations like riots these community based projects help people overcome their economic, physical and psychological devastation. The Himmat Workshops, apart from creating political awareness, also opened possibilities of intervention through visual means. These community projects are seen by Vasudha as an ongoing process, and as “the recording of the process through writing, painting, digital media, as an archive against forgetting and creation of a context specific resource”.
The significance of such projects, apart from the support it gives and options it creates is, its stress on mourning and remembering such tragedies. Since there are often attempts by the state and fascist powers to forget such genocides and normalize social thinking, there should be attempts by the people to willfully remember such incidents and disrupt normalizing the systemic violence of the state. Vasudha’s project, seen in such light would be one of those willful acts of remembering which she herself opines as an ‘ongoing project/process’. The following is a recent interview with Vasudha Thozhur on her collaborative projects in particular and her other engagements with society through art.



“The abundance of real suffering tolerates no forgetting” -Adorno

Interview with Vasudha Thozhur

Question: When did you first start such community based art projects or such collaborative ventures?

Vasudha: In 2002, during the right-wing pogroms in Gujarat. It was a situation which needed to be confronted. One couldn’t continue working as if nothing had happened. We took part in rallies and demonstrations against the violence, but one also needed to do things which could actually be effective at ground level. I decided to apply to the IFA (India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore) for funding because I was entering a new area of functioning and therefore needed a support system.
The project had to be collaborative in nature because it was community-based, and dealt with a complex socio-political predicament. I approached an activist writer, Bina Srinivasan, and worked with her during the first phase of the project. Later, I worked with Himmat, a collective initiated by Monica Wahi and Zaid Ahmed Shaikh.

Question: How do you intervene as an artist activist?

Vasudha: One needs to be able to apply one’s intentions to a workable format - otherwise things will just not happen. There were several aspects that needed to be addressed, and it had to be sustained work. One needed to create a serial workshop situation - it couldn’t have been been done in a week or two.

Question: How do you work out your ideas? Do you approach things with premeditation?

Vasudha: In the initial phase there were a lot of discussions with Bina Srinivasn and also with some NGOs, since we were meeting fairly frequently as concerned citizens. You begin to see what people expect from you. Usually, a very limited role is assigned to the artist – like making posters, etc., and one is told exactly how to do it. There is a lack of trust, or confidence, in the language that we use – it is seen as elitist and not truly communicative. So you see there are a lot of prejudices which one needs to overcome. I saw that as a challenge and I wanted to prove, to myself as well, that art practice is not merely something which happens at an intellectual, individual level in a controlled environment. It is a vital ingredient of the human spirit, has great healing powers and facilitates expression within communities at the collective level. Of course, collaboration can be a very problematic thing when one party begins to dominate the other, and the question arises as how not to do this. How do you retain complete freedom and continue to collaborate at the same time? So within a collaborative space, you create pockets of autonomy. What comes out of it is what comes out of it – one pays attention to the grammar of making as opposed to imposing a pre-meditated form on the outcome. An object that is actually shaped by working together - I don’t look at it critically in terms of aesthetics, in the way that I would look at my own painting.

Question: Often while talking about your project, the cathartic or healing power of art is emphasized.

Vasudha: Healing is just one aspect. The space we created for the workshops was experimental in nature – and involved a lot of research. For instance, we couldn’t have the older members of the community working in that area because it was not going to bring them immediate or significant returns. The economic factor was something which was very much on our minds when we worked out the format. Monica identified the girls for me. Some of them were deeply disturbed by the loss that they had suffered and had dropped out of school for that reason. They were given a small stipend during the time that they worked with us. Some of their mothers were working at the center that Monica and Zaid had set up, at Mayur Park, in Vatwa on the outskirts of Ahmedabad.

Question:

Often it is considered that art and films can really make a difference in society, particularly in such an uncertain situation like riots.

VASUDHA: Yes, but it should not just be within a small circle of concerned people, rather it should directly enhance the life of the affected community. For instance, through the workshops, the girls acquired a range of skills. They learnt screen printing, handled cameras; they learnt to draw and paint, to write, and so on. We made several field trips to art institutions in Ahmedabad, like NID and the School of Architecture. A kind of working model evolves which could be implemented and developed further. The organizations that we work with also begin to understand what can be done via art practice.

Question: Have you ever felt a sense of guilt in response to a situation like this?

Vasudha: Till I did the project I often felt a sense of guilt, but not anymore. I would wonder why I was painting in my studio while people were dying or suffering around me. I think this guilt is all the more acute for artists who live in developing countries with turbulent histories. But having put so much energy into a public project, I know my own limits – and also realize that working with people can happen in very different ways. It is not always necessary to do an art project. One needs nourishment too, as an artist there is a need to paint, to retreat, to go back to the studio. It gives one the strength to go out and work with people again. One can’t hold on to a certain way of doing things for life. Certain abstract questions are also very important, and need to be communicated - like the relationship between a community project and one’s own work.

Question: Where did you display the final outcome of the project and how was it displayed?

Vasudha: Segments of the project were displayed at several places, all within the Vatva area. We also mounted a major exhibition in the beginning of 2007 at the Hutteesingh gallery within the CEPT campus in Ahmedabad, on the 5th anniversary of the carnage. The work had earlier been shown at the Khoj premises in New Delhi in 2006 while I was in residence there to edit video footage which the girls had shot. Six films have so far been edited from this footage. Most of them are of a documentary nature. The longest film, Cutting Chai, is about visiting the girls’ homes in Faizal Park. It has been screened independent of other exhibits by Vikalp in Bombay and at an experimental film festival, Experimenta 2007. Another exhibition that we participated in was “After- images” curated by Ranjit Contractor. Some of the paintings were also shown at the WSF in Delhi, at a social forum in Nairobi and at a peace festival in Mumbai.

Question: Do the paintings and videos done by the girls in the workshops show images of horror or violence?

Vasudha: They don’t. Very few of the images actually depict violence. One of my basic concerns was the consumption of such images, which can be problematic and sometimes counter-productive. There are other ways of working around it, which are more about coming out of the predicament.
For example there are some narrative scrolls which talk about civic problems like lack of water, issues of education etc., and an interesting painting of a news reader speaking about the film ‘Parzania’ being banned in Gujarat.
The girls also chose images from their paintings and translated them into motifs that could be used commercially, as embroidery or block prints on fabric.

Question: Tell us about the books, which were also a kind of collaborative venture?

Vasudha: We have completed four small books using written documentation compiled via the project – ‘The Story of Five Posters’, ‘Mahakali versus Megacity’, ‘The Project’ and ‘Bibi Tere Naam Himmat’, which is in memory of Bibi Banoo. There are also photographs which will be printed as photo essays - ‘Gandhi Ashram to Faizal Park’ and ‘Mahakali versus Megacity’.

Question: On the one hand your painting seems to be autobiographical but when it comes to a public project how do you cope with this highly personalized and autobiographical idiom?

Vasudha: It is all about intersections. At some point our personal lives intersect with the public domain in a very powerful, revealing way. One experiences a very deep connectivity that collapses the difference between the public and the private. My painting, for instance, is not just about myself, it is about ‘being’ and how important it is to actually relate to what is happening outside of yourself from within yourself. Unless the ‘self’ comes into play, nothing is ‘real’, it remains at the level of abstraction. The self is in a way very important and also not important because it is merely a framework through which you can view the world. But it is still unique, and owes its value to being so, like a thumb impression.

Interviewed by Rollie Mukherjee,
Artist and Critic,
Baroda.