[Revue is a two member team of an artist and a media practitioner. Revue’s practices with regard to urban space are generally twofold. Through the projects, using and combining different media Revue document the changes in the city and study how these changes affect peoples’ lives. Revue also explore, adapt and create space for public interactions and collective intellectual and creative practice.]



Urban Context and Community Engagement:

Our socially engaged art practice in the metropolis of Delhi has involved experimenting with new genres of art across different populations in working-class localities. Our practice-based research focuses on the representation of social issues through works created in collaboration with communities and through direct interaction and intervention in the physical spaces of urban neighbourhoods. Our practice engages with people in their own daily contexts, facilitating the genesis of artwork from within living and working spaces in the city, using low-cost local materials and a range of traditional and innovative media forms.

One of the starkest visual outcomes of contemporary neo-liberal political environments and economic policies that have catalysed globalization on an unforeseen and unimaginable scale is the transformation of metropolitan landscapes. Delhi is no exception. Its urban geography is rapidly mutating to accommodate the ever-expanding construction of skyscrapers, corporate offices, and shopping malls. Its public, historical, and green spaces are encroached upon and appropriated, shrinking and disappearing as state property is sold and ‘developed’ into commercial mega-projects for private business interests.

Like major cities all over the world, Delhi has bloated via the influx of millions of impoverished rural and small-town migrants, who create their own precarious settlements, infrastructure and relational circuits in whatever corner they can find, tenaciously persisting against all odds and becoming permanent residents of the city over time and over generations. This migrant working class is subject to modes of urban alienation, even while the city enlarges these communities’ frames of reference, dismantles provincial prejudices, and offers a range of new affiliations and autonomies. Paradoxically hostile and hospitable, the new habitat of seductive modernity and burgeoning capital also significantly enables personal and collective expression through its function as a social interface. This results in a new kind of connectivity, ingenuity and informal local networks and ecologies that crucially allow an uprooted and dis-enfranchised demographic to not only survive conditions of deprivation, but in fact to thrive.

As practitioners of socially engaged art, we visualise and render projects inviting a range of participants from these backgrounds to individually and collectively narrate their personal experiences of the changing urban milieu through a variety of media and art forms. The collaborative ethic of our practice falls within the conceptual domain of relational art, whose basic hypothesis “is the sphere of human relations as a site of artworks” (Bourriaud 1998). This approach foregrounds the dialogue of project participants with their material context, i.e., the locality and its public spaces. Simultaneously, the trajectory of ‘dialogue’ within our socially engaged art projects extends much further, wider and deeper than our communication with participants, the inter-subjective exchanges between participants, and the layered, textured inscription of participant voices. The narrative polyphony emerging from this mode of creative dialogue disseminates “rhizomatically”, i.e., as a social process theorized by Deleuze and Guattari who observe that as a structure, the rhizome “connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs…” The rhizome consists “not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion”. Not defined by sets of points and positions, the rhizome “is made only of lines; lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature.” These lines or “ligaments” are different from the “localizable linkages between points and positions”; and the map produced through the rhizome is “always detatchable, connectable, reversable, modifiable, and has multiple entranceways and exits and its own lines of flight” (A Thousand Plateaus, 1987).

In our dialogic practice, there is no monolithic, hegemonic, specific way of speaking, listening or responding. Our processes run parallel to each other and often continuously overlap in an interplay of sound, visuality, visibility, mobility, and time. This is particularly true of our work in ‘resettlement colonies’, sprawling, congested working-class localities that evolved through the arbitrary displacement, by civic authorities and urban planners, of large segments of underprivileged people from various parts of the city over the last five decades, under the state rubric of ‘development’, ‘modernisation’, ‘beautification’, ‘gentrification’, ‘public health’, etc. These uprooted communities were forced into areas with poor or non-existent infrastructure, often having to build their dwellings again with whatever material was available. The open-ended rhizomatic model is also applicable to our work in what are known as ‘urban villages’, i.e., agricultural land and rural habitation that was once outside the city but is now overtaken, surrounded and assimilated into the city’s expansion and ‘development’ that continues at an unbroken, furious, frenzied pace, and continues to cause profound demographic and sociological shifts – “lines of flight” – in the affected populations.

Our objective in each context is to shape new art forms within given local nodes and imperatives, as well as to catalyse, release and uncover the aesthetic logic inherent and embedded in the existential matrix of urban communities, each with particular histories, cartographies, demographics, socioeconomic patterns and cultural affiliations.


Dialogic Practice through Creative Media Forms:

Whatever the context of our work and whatever the range of dialogue-based possible interventions, our focus is always on the generation of intermediate, experimental, innovative, interactive media forms that contextualise and augment symbolic expression within, and of, daily life. A public space like a market has many entries and exit points as well as multiple focal points. There is a constant flux of users/participants, and they are scattered as well as cohesive, operating sequentially as well as synchronously. Within this larger flow are sites of inherent sociality that remain stable, such as tea and food stalls, barber shops, etc., where people daily spend time and engage in conversation. Similarly, a wall is a potential location for dialogue, available to be inscribed and responded to by passers-by or people working or living around it. The specific mode of creative engagement in the locality depends on whether the space is public or private, open or closed.

The media forms arising from the engagement, and their presence, circulation, and effects, are also contingent on the nature of the space. A sticker functions as a sudden, concentrated, often dramatic signifier that briefly ruptures the visual field, whereas a wall painting reorients the viewer’s perception of the surrounding space itself. Creative content is more easily disseminated through a newspaper or broadsheet than through a booklet, particularly in areas of low literacy. We channel our dialogue-based interventions through varied forms such as wall blogs, wall paintings, stickers, posters, performances, storytelling, objects, exhibitions, newspapers, hoardings, banners, booklets, broadsheets, etc.

We work with the understanding that regular and personalized interaction with participants is the core of socially engaged art practice, and that production is intimately bonded to process and all its layers. Creative sessions are open-ended. Scheduled processes may at any time disperse into spontaneous activity. Unsettling differences between a manifestation in the moment and its later incarnation or version, its documentation via text or image, are noted and assimilated.


Wall Painting:

A wall painting initiative evolved through our discussion sessions with Group of young women in Khirkee. The idea was to paint a series of ordinary women doing daily activities and engaging in work that is customarily done by men in the locality. The in tent was to draw men on the street into a dialogue about the gender equality in terms of the acceptance of women in male-associated professions, as well as dialogue about the visibility of women in public spaces.


Wall Blog:

Walls in cities are primarily seen as barriers, delineating and legitimising spaces and functioning as a means of exclusion and inclusion. Walls around urban public spaces such as parks belong to everybody and to nobody. As a built form they are a witness as well as repository of personal stories. And as a social structure they offer themselves as a canvas for creative expression, in the form of graffiti, news, protest, ideological rhetoric and other informal modes of collective articulation.

Our wall blog created for the project Park in 2008-09 invites passers-by and local residents to log their experience of the neighbourhood, as well as their own dreams, thoughts, aspirations. This mode of linked articulation and collective image-making on a reliable, fixed and familiar local structure invites participation, narration and re-inscription, extending the tentative initial dialogue to stronger, deeper and wider levels of relationality.


Print/Publication:

Zines:

During our project Publik Booth 2009 in Edinburgh, we spoke to various people about history of public spaces on the streets and in different locations such as shops, pubs, community centers, etc. Rather than framing and exhibiting the content of our local dialogue within a fixed, enclosed gallery space, we decided to disseminate the information back into the locations it arose from.

We produced a tabloid to circulate among different publics in different parts of the old city. For the projects Network Neighbourhood and Mobile Mohalla we have been producing zines regularly based on the texts written and collected by community research group Khirkee Collective. The zine was initially named as Mulaqaton Ki Galiyan in Hindi and Lanes of Encounters in English. Later it is renamed as Mulaqat in both Hindi and English. It is produced in both English and Hindi so that it could be circulated among the local Hindi speaking community and international migrants.


Billboard:

Billboard was designed during the project City Invisible. This project was looking at the locality of Khirki, an urban village in south Delhi, how it is changing with the development happening around it. A new shopping mall, private hospital and a district court was being built across the road that time. Thus, Khirki was going though significant change that time. Old houses were rebuilt, new kinds of shops were opened as new working population started living in Khirki. To talk about these changes we designed a 30ft. x 10ft. wide billboard and installed it on an empty land located between Khirki and the shopping mall. We were conceptually replicating the billboards we see in the city when a new site is developed.


T’shirt:

T’shirt was designed based on the conversation we had on freedom of choice with young women in the community. This line “Live with your choice” came from an Afghan girl who have extremely limited freedom regarding clothes and movements. We organised cycle rallies for girls in the locality wearing the T’shirts.

Buttons:

Similarly buttons were made with the line “Live without pressure”. Again, emerged from similar conversation among the girls.


Page Marks, Cards & Mugs:

In the project called Axial Margins, Revue is working with ten homeless single women who are engaged in paintings.

They are painting on walls of their shelter, on clothes, canvases and canvas boards. We used these paintings to create marchendise to enable these women to speak with the larger community, to make them visible not as a victim but as fellow citizens with due respectability


Books:

New Exciting Space is Opening Soon is a book produced during the project City Invisible. It

is an art book containing drawings and texts by Sreejata, interviews and texts written by people living and working in Khirki where the project was located. The book The Story of an Atlas is produced with the images of the maps that are drawn on the wall of the media lab by Khirkee Collective for the project Mobile Mohalla. It contains the images of maps drawn by Khirkee Collective on the wall of the studio and notes and observations made by geographer-researcher Nian Paul.


Storytelling/Performance:

During a residency in Edinburgh in 2009 we observed that many market spaces were not actual markets but topographic indices. There is no actual commerce or transaction: these spaces are just names, signifiers of a local history in which these sites were demolished, relocated, redesigned or even closed at various times. The names of streets, lanes and by-lanes testify to the absence of what once must have been dynamic and flourishing communities. Our project Publik Booth focused on researching the social and cultural life that at one time characterized these now silent ‘markets’.

We wanted to find out, through historical data and through personal narratives of residents, how community relationships in these public spaces were built, maintained and expanded. These spaces became the site for our project, and the source of various stories and information about the Edinburgh of an earlier time. In the course of our research we encountered a group of elderly ladies in a community centre where they come to spend their time and share some social interaction. They told us many stories about the situation in Edinburgh after World War II and later periods, when the local markets were still very active and the energetic shouting of vendors and the bargaining by customers could be heard all day long. They also narrated the same stories to an audience of young local people through a session we organised at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in the city.

Handful of voices whose stories unfurl in front of audience is an attempt to understand multiple perceptions and a multitude of realities from where it all emerges. What makes their stories different from the rest?  In the project Networks & Neighbourhoods and Mobile Mohalla the authors of the zines regularly read their stories in the public spaces to facilitate dialogue with the listeners. These events take place in the lanes of Khirki and Hauz Rani.


Practice and Principles:

As indicated by these examples, all our work is socially oriented, based on building relationships through dialogue with the community, and re-narrating, sharing the narratives that emerge through these relationships. Simultaneously concept, methodology, process and outcome, dialogue has central place and is a central instrument in our community-based artistic and pedagogical engagements. The mode of dialogue emerges from and depends entirely on the mode of engagement and imperatives of context. While the articulation differs in each case, the primary objective in all our projects is to widen the circle of practice, practitioners, participants, collaborators and contributors.

Through our artistic involvement we have observed that dialogic interventions in community-based art projects effectively push back interlinked material and psychological boundaries – as posited by Mikhail Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination, 1992), the essential value of dialogue is that through “living conversation” not only do “various different points of view, conceptual horizons, systems for providing expressive accents, various social ‘languages’ come to interact with one another… at any given moment, languages of various epochs and periods of socio-ideological life cohabit with one another…” Thus, the fulcrum of our collaborative/community-based practice is relationality in different forms, on different interdependent levels, and with different social and symbolic resonances. We foreground and explore relationality as a thematic which may either be produced in and through a given work, or be the subject matter of a given work, or both.

We agree with Grant Kester’s assertion that while socially engaged art and its “dialogical aesthetic” are defined and understood differently all over the world, the common denominator is that all such projects seek to disrupt and reconstitute “previously sovereign forms of agency and subjectivity in the work of art” through structural interventions in terms of both production and reception (Kester 2004). Our dialogic interventions situate us in various relational roles vis-à-vis the community, formally and informally – as facilitators, pedagogues, researchers, ethnographers, oral historians, etc. This enables us to continually reflect on crucial issues in the domain of socially engaged art that we continually encounter on the ground: the demanding ethics of collaborative creation, participation, consensus, collectivity, authorship, intentionality, presence, claims, the insider-outsider dialectic within community projects, etc.

Moreover, as researchers, we have come to understand through our practice that socially engaged art, especially when based on dialogic principles, cannot be evaluated, substantiated or validated through the empirical, objective parameters of concrete ‘outcomes’, ‘changes’, ‘benefits’ and ‘products’ within the community. Our interventions are structured on the assumption that as a living process, dialogue itself is fully all of these. The vital, supple, resilient pulse of dialogue, with its equivocations and ambiguities, cannot be reduced to flat reiterations of prescriptive ‘data’, or be caged within formulaic ‘findings’ and ‘conclusions’.

Above all, as socially engaged artists we also subscribe to and embed in our work the model of inclusion which, as Suzanne Lacey (Lacy 2010) affirms, “takes a stand for social justice and equality” through creative engagement that puts forward “persuasive agreements for different cultural and ethical value hierarchies.” This principle of inclusion is manifested through the dialogic activity and polyphonic expression at the heart of our own practice. This mode of mutuality enables a dynamic condition for self-assertion and more confident personal articulation, especially in contexts where dis-enfranchised, deprived and/or marginalized communities are generally expected to be subordinate, passive and self-censoring with regard to their social claims, public presence and individual voice.


References:

Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, University of California Press, 2004

Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Brian Massumi, Thousand Plateaus, University of Minnesota, 1987

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, University of Texas Press Slavic series; no. I, 1992

Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Les Presse Du Reel; Les Presses Du Reel edition, 1998


Images courtesy : Revue