project by Arpita Akhanda

 stage 1:

To select text according to my practice.

so , i selected:

 Excerpt from

Site Specific Art

Performance,space and documentation

By

Nick Keya

 

"

site’:

substantive

. [. . .] local position [. . .] The place or position

occupied by some specified thing. Frequently implying original

or fixed position.

‘site’:

1. transitive. To locate, to place.

2.intransitive. To be

situated or placed.

To ‘read’ the sign is to have located the signifier, to have recognised its

place within the semiotic system. One can go on from this to argue

that the location, in reading, of an image, object, or event, its

positioning in relation to political, aesthetic, geographical,

institutional, or other discourses, all inform what ‘it’ can be said

to be.Site-specificity, then, can be understood in terms of this process,

while a ‘site-specific work’ might articulate and define itself through

properties, qualities or meanings produced in specific relationships

between an ‘object’ or ‘event’ and a position it occupies. After the

‘substantive’ notion of site, such site-specific work might even assert

a ‘proper’ relationship with its location, claiming an ‘original and

fixed position’ associated with what it

is. This formulation echo esthe sculptor Richard Serra’s response to the public debate, and legal action, over the removal of his ‘site-specific’ sculpture Tilted Arc of1981. Offering a key definition of ‘site-specific’ work, Serraconcluded simply and unequivocally that ‘To move the work is todestroy the work’ (Serra 1994: 194). To move the site-specific work is to re-place it, to make it something else. "

.

Stage 2 and 3:

 selection of space in the architectural site and reading performance :

 

 

  I selected the space to enter the architecture for my reading performance. Since my texts talks about how removing a work from the site changes the work in site specific works , I place my body in between the entrance door of the building and read the text the sound produces was changed because the mouth was pushed by the door and echoed in the building inside where as was hardly heard outside.

Stage 4:
using drawing as a method to activate that space with the text and performance.

                                                    this is the layout of the text on the space
 I adopted the process of cutting as drawing, drew my silhouette out of the paper and placed on the position where I performed on the site.

Stage 5:
 Final display where we had to use the method of flex printing to document our performance an text:
 

                                                        viewers interaction with the work

Project by Biplab Sarkar

Site Specific Architectural Dialogue with Text and Performance

This project was to create a site specific Architectural Dialogue, around a specific building i.e the painting studio of BFA 3rd year and 4th year, into an active space through reading performance by 4th year students of department of painting, Kala Bhavana under the guidance of Sanchayan Ghosh, Associate Professor, Department of Painting, Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan.
The initial idea was to collect texts based on our practice , followed by  selection of space in that particular architecture to generate a dialogue through the text selected. The selection of space was followed by a reading performance using the body of the reader with the architecture. Finally , on the final day of workshop all the different activities where shared on the different spaces.
The participating students are:
Biplab Sarkar
Subhankar Majumdar
Sumon Chandra
Sanjib Ku. Das
Rajdeep Das
Probin Das
Kanak Sarkar
Subhendu Choudhury
Rishi Kumar
Bijit Das
Arni Sarkar
Samiksha
Arpita Akhanda
Payel Sutradhar
Mantu Singh
Ghanashyam Latua
Dinar Sultana

imagination on archive memory by subhankar majumder

group photo

Project by- Bhaskar Hazarika

Re-encountering “NATURE” -Bhaskar Hazarika

7.2.2015

For a hour, I made myself cut off from the world where I am habituated to live, -‘the urban world’ and trying to understand what is the urge that worked behind my personal choice of having a temporary exile in this farm with many trees, weeds, animals, insects, birds, pond and agriculture.  Keeping the mobile phone switch off, I was sitting under trees alone. That situational placement of ‘me’ in a jungle always provokes the memory and takes me to different time than the real time. That memory is probably about the missing link between the modern man and the ‘nature.’ If the two sides of the same coin are- civilized (or modern) and the savage, or the raw and cooked, then  for a time being, I was trying to locate myself in the ‘raw’ side of the coin. Is the return of modern man to the raw nature possible? Perhaps, this is not such attempt too, but that question will be always asked to the man who tries to return.

The modern man has been always going into the ‘nature’ only and only to consume it. There is no alteration of that approach is ever seen. Or if there is any alternative approach applied then that is to give the justification against modern man’s exploitation of ‘nature.’  

Here, the farm is a modern man’s initiative to revisit nature with minimum intervention. The attempt is of course the demand of our time and evolved from the crisis of being an endangered one, but with a slightly different methodology and approach. This attempt must be appreciated because it is an experiment to re-search the methodology of co-existence.

Is it a romantic one, seeing or enjoying ‘nature’? Or is it beautiful? A bunch of trees, a pond, birds, cows- are they meaningful? The nature is as it is. The objects of nature are raw and do not carry any kind meaning until unless we impose that meaning from our desire over them. A flower is not beautiful at all because that beauty is our desire. It is the desire of enjoying or consuming that flower other way. Here, what I felt is that, I always know that, in nature what I am looking for. But is nature watching me? How the nature reacts in my presence, is my idea of intervention in ‘Nature.’             

A bed of dead woods and their poems -Bhaskar Hazarika

19th Feb. 2015

Today, I have spent a long time with the dump of tree trunks. I slept, sit, walked, and crawled over the dead wood pieces to take all possible bodily experience of being with them. I was experiencing their rough surface, wet smell, sizes, weight and the space defined by their presence in cluster. Then I made a shell for me with the woods like a bed of woods set for the funeral fire. 

I remember the poems on “nature,” those I read in my childhood. After searching a while, I found a decayed book of poems - Marua Phul (in Assamese) in my bookshelf where there are many romantic poems on “nature” and wonders of her. I am going to read this decayed book and its poems on “mother nature” again in that wood shell as once upon a time I used to read them in my home.