What underlies your current exhibition, Trash? Is it your comment on the new culture of waste and excess? Or, in using trash to create new things, are you pointing to a potential for redemption?
Most people read it as a comment — and critique — of a consumer society and that, of course, is inevitable. But if you look beyond that first frame or lens, there is a whole fantastic pleasure principle going on. When I completed the installation, I had invited around a 100 artists and friends to my studio. The one common thing in their responses was delight. It seemed to bring out something of the child in everyone. If you let any kid, upper-class or poor — the poor, in any case, are living in filth and at every moment are picking up things and playing with it; but if parents would stop chiding their kids and let them follow their instinct, even rich kids would love to pick up things from the street and make something imaginary with it. Filth is something you like to put your hands into, as kids you love to muck about and build fantasy castles and all sorts of things from nothing, so the fact that I had orchestrated this like some city planner and laid it all out really seemed to strike people. In fact, a very brilliant Italian artist said he found my work fascinating because, by and large, artists use trash in an expressionist way, they make an extra creative mess out of it, whereas I was using a very strong organising principle. Garbage is normally experienced only as chaos and entropy and you hate it and wish our cities would get cleaned up. But this Italian artist said to me, “We Italians discovered perspective and depth and you have used some of those strategies to lay out this garbage in a way that makes one think of it in new ways.”
It is not easy to translate — how can one relate to garbage outside the notions of cleanliness? We Indians also have this caste thing: it is for the Dalit to clean the mess you have created but don’t want to touch. The other point is, I have destroyed the city I created. Now it lives only through its translations as photography and the video, which is called Turning. What I am making a comment about with this is that in poor countries, huge amounts of population live with an immense sense of instability; from moment to moment, they do not know when they will be destroyed, when their houses will be demolished. Yet, they accept this and do not give up and start again to build, sometimes moving elsewhere, sometimes building on the same spot until they come again to demolish it. So much of humanity lives like this — far from the concrete structures and gated colonies we are accustomed to — so I got fog machines and wind machines and in the video you will see things keep collapsing — I make them collapse, I pull them down — and they come up again. I have also included texts of Rumi — so at one end there is the social commentary and poignancy, but there is also a sense of play and of a poetic metaphor.
In a sense, you were like a magician, creating a city of fantasy. Did you find yourself organising your city in ways different from the cities we live in? Did anything utopian come about in the way you ordered your trash city?
Many things happened spontaneously. I did have a masterplan, but every masterplan has to be subverted by the chaos and entropy and what is not planned. Much of our cities — 60 percent, Charles Correa will say 70 percent — is unplanned, so some of this garbage entropy is a metaphor for the unplanned. In the foreground, you will see a demolition site, the scene beneath ground zero, and then you move further and further to the skyscrapers.
How did you collect the material?
For over a year, I had been attending meetings every other Sunday with Chintan [an NGO working with ragpickers]. I’d sit in for two to three hours and listen to their problems and established some relationship. Once I got this idea, I asked the kabadiwallas for 100 kilos of plastic bottles and 100 kilos of this and that — three tempos arrived at my studio, during the monsoon, it was filthy. We had to fumigate the material (thousands of flies died !), lock the studio, let the fumes settle and come back the next day. Waste pickers are constantly picking through things, and that’s what we did next. We sorted through it all, laid everything out in different areas, and then made a six-inch mud base and started building our city.
(Trash opens in Delhi at Photoink, in September, 2008.)
