Process

The broad conceptual question that we have had in mind since we began working in Khirki through Khoj, is the larger question of “knowing” a place and how one could arrive at suitable forms of representation through that process of knowing. The process of knowing is obviously not without its own set of problematics. And given that we all practice representation in some form or the other, these representations become expressions of this process of knowing.

We have not engaged with Khirki village for long, in fact we began a first phase of slightly intensive interaction with people and spaces in Khirki only through this work – Zariyein, spread over three weeks in November. The intention behind this work was to try and create a very basic sense of how Khirki could be looked at in visual terms, as well as define our entry points into this space, as outsiders entering a space/context which is not our own. What ought to be the nature of this engagement and what was the knowing of Khirki we could arrive at?

Knowing of a space can be facilitated through various means- time/relationships/ details/ questionnaires/ conversations- methods of researching into people and places. However another method of probing people and places could also be a quick cursory engagement and we consciously chose to push this strand/nature of engagement. Photographs along with texts, we thought, was one approach that we could adopt as a method for this engagement. Conversations mediated through photographs, brief encounters and acquaintances formed during the “doing” of the work, compositional details of what was contained in the photographs of Khirki, we felt, could help us arrive at a basic understanding of the place and the people, though to a limited extent.

The process…… we gave cameras to four residents of Khirki- Laxmi, a schoolgirl who has also been associated with several community art projects of Khoj in the past, Dinesh who runs a tea shop just outside Khoj, KT who runs a haircutting saloon very close to Dinesh’s tea shop and Kamal, who does not live in Khirki but has been working in Hauz Rani adjoining Khirki village for the last fifteen years. He is a cobbler by profession. We gave them an automatic camera each and asked them to expose one roll of film- their visual impressions of what Khirki is or the things that they identified with or liked in Khirki or photographs which they simply wished to click. The four of us facilitating this project also clicked photographs of our initial, fleeting impressions of Khirki.

What was most significant when the photographs came back to us was the insider position that most of the photographs taken by the residents of Khirki contained – the ease with which personal lives, spaces, friends had been captured, while our (the facilitators’) photographs had an obvious outside eye- the photographs tended to become references to various spatial locations in Khirki, or different kinds of work practices that we saw in Khirki, the people who we clicked remaining people who were faceless, literally on-the-surface kind of photographs. This, of course, was to be expected.

All eight of us then selected ten photographs each from the photographs that we had ourselves clicked and this corpus of eighty images went up on what we call the “first wall”. This first wall in miniature form was then taken around in Khirki and Hauz Rani to a random scattering of people who were asked to select four photographs each which they would like to put up on another wall (our “second wall”), according to a placing and an order that they would like. We recorded their reasons for selecting and ordering these photographs on the second wall. We told them what we were trying to do through this process – arrive at a very basic “nazariya”/perspective of what Khirki was for them and what a combination of “nazariyas”/perspectives could throw up on the second wall. This process of selection and the reasons for that selection was significant, in the sense, they threw light on what aspects of Khirki presented in these photographs spoke to them and what they identified with. The reasons were manifold- sometimes, the prominent markers of Khirki as a space for the outside world- the “killa”, the “mandir”; sometimes, very personal associations like “my daughter, my house or my shop”, sometimes, “yeh photo acchha laga”. Several photographs also met with disapproval – “kya mean hai, kya darshana chahte hain?” The four of us also selected photographs through which we could define our relationship with Khirki, a very primeval knowing, that had developed through the course of the work. Initially, “our” photographs were intended to go up on what we called the third wall, a space removed from the second but meant for the same purpose. But somewhere, in the course of the work, the distinction between the second and the third wall broke down in our heads, the spaces that these two walls were meant to represent merged into a single unit.

Sound recordings were also an integral part of this process; however, they were restricted to recordings of responses to the photographs and the act of taking photographs at different stages. We did two stages of recordings, extremely brief and cursory – the first with the four people from Khirki who had clicked photographs, where we asked them their experiences while clicking photographs and their reasons for deciding to take the photographs that they had taken. These recordings were edited by us to convey a sense of the act of taking photographs in Khirki and were played next to the first wall when the walls were out for public display. A second stage of recordings was done when we were assembling the “second wall”. We recorded peoples’ reasons for selecting their four photographs as well as their general responses to the eighty photographs. The edited sound tracks, we hope, call attention to the process (where the intentions of the photographers and the people who selected four photographs become apparent) as well as imbue the photographs with a different layer of meaning……the recorded responses themselves seem to contain a certain visual imagination of/association with the Khirki that the photographs signify. Texts on the second & third walls-texts which broadly spoke about peoples’ sense of familiarity with Khirki, their reasons for selecting/identifying with certain photographs as well as their comments on the whole process were culled out from these audio recordings.

The four walls, three filled up and one empty, along with the two edited sound recordings and an edited video projection of the second wall being assembled, were set up in a public place in Khirki as the final installation of the work. The larger public was invited to view, hear and experience the installation and on the basis of this experience they were invited to participate in the creation of the fourth wall. For the fourth wall, people had the liberty to write whatever they wished to and they had the choice of selecting one or more image from the first eighty images that were placed on the first wall. For us, the act of putting up images/texts on the fourth wall by a larger public was a logical completion of the entire process and the work. The photographs selected and the reasons/ associations that people ascribed to them besides all other kinds of writing that went up on the fourth wall added to the meanings that had been attached to the photographs at the previous stages.

How do we read the present responses to the fourth wall, so that it could be made intrinsic for the work to be taken forward?

Once this work is carried out amongst different publics and the fourth wall is done anew, how does one read the various interpretations of the fourth wall?

What are the different dimensions that could be thrown up if this work is taken out of the physical location of Khirki to other kinds of public and communities?

Is this a community art project? Why? How? There was community participation in which people from the “community” become active agents in a process which was, at the end of the day, facilitated by us.

Could a cursory engagement of this nature also be a movement towards knowing people and places?

Zariyein is a first step in what we envisage as being a larger work spread over a period of time, in exploring this whole question of “knowing” that we entered Khirki with. In retrospect, we can only say that Zariyein has become a means for us to create a very basic sense of familiarity with the people who we worked with through this process and we feel more comfortable walking down the lane to Khoj. And yes, we imagine Khirki very differently from where we started.

Zariyein >>> East Khasi Hills >>> Meghalaya

Zariyein, in its first phase, was carried out in Khirki Village and was directed towards arriving at a very basic “knowing” of the space, Khirki, using the medium of photographs and conversations to try and create a collective understanding and representation of the space. We would now like to extend the scope of Zariyein by using the same methods in an altogether distinct context – Meghalaya.

We are currently about to commence researching the phenomena of a bus that is very significant for rural populations in the East Khasi Hills of Meghalaya. These buses, called bazaar buses in local parlance, are used to convey people and ferry goods between these areas and Iewduh (Barabazaar), the main trading centre of the region located in Shillong. These particular villages are “remote” not in terms of distance from urban Shillong but in terms of access to health care and education, livelihood options, availability of basic resources like electricity and drinking water and numerous other factors which are very limited. Given this scenario, the bus plays an extremely significant role beyond its most obvious purpose of conveyance. It is the lifeline of these villages. 

However, there are several other intangible dimensions attached to the bus, an exploration of which is crucial to understand the significance of the bus.  The bus is an active space of sociality- an interface between these villages and urban Shillong. It is also one of the few spaces where people from different villages meet, given the relative isolation of these villages from each other. The bus thus becomes a medium of ‘conveying’ and sharing news, information, gossip which travels not only between the villages and Shillong but also between different villages.  Besides being an active space of sociality, the bus becomes a vehicle for the movement of the “idea” of “Shillong” back to these areas. Alternatively, the image of these buses in urban Shillong also creates an imagination of the “rural” for people in urban Shillong. What is the imagination of the urban that travels back to these villages and how does this inflect on the lives of people there? How does the “idea” of “urban Shillong” translate, articulate and have an impact on local imagination or aspirations in these villages, if at all it does? Through Zariyein, we would like to explore these intangible facets of the bus in its journey from these villages to Shillong. We feel that Zariyein, using the medium of the visual and sound, could unravel these ephemeral facets of the bus which may not emerge through conventional research approaches. The steps that were adopted in the doing of Zariyein in Khirki – handing out cameras, selection of images, recording conversations and a mobile installation- may need to be adapted to suit the specificities of the bus, its journey and ideas and people associated with the bus.

Zariyein- overview

The idea of this work came about while trying to find entries to working in Khirki and the people who live here in ways that could push methods and meanings of evolving sustained engagements, in the future. Notions of ‘researching’/ trying to ‘represent’ and ‘open out’ static yet ephemeral city spaces like Khirki were/are some of the questions we are attempting to unravel here. Touch upon actually…for these are yet just minor beginnings for all four of us.

This work seeks the participation of some of the residents of Khirki to collectively create a visual-scape of the space, using photographs and texts produced by/ with them. How does a space, when lived in, through its everyday experiences get inflected with people’s sense of familiarity/distance/ownership/ symbol for something that is continuous/adjunct or outside of their everyday lives? We look towards arriving at some basic simple questions about Khirki.

We began by handing out automatic cameras to 4 residents of Khirki- a cobbler, a barber, a teenage girl and a tea khomcha owner, in the area. The initial idea was discussed with them and they were asked to take photographs of Khirki, as they saw it- the way they would like to share or give a peep into Khirki to outsiders. Four of us ‘outsiders’ also took photographs simultaneously, trying to capture images that signified Khirki for us, from our current positions. All the photographers were then asked to filter down the first round of their images to 10 photographs each. The discretion in selection unearthed interesting reasons (and maybe hidden pointers..) – some personal (friends/ my shop/ my road), some symbolic (history/ the city/ ‘type of people’), some removed, some fleeting and impressionistic in nature.

Using the set of 80, we, i.e. we four ‘outside’ eyes, created the first wall of what Khirki was for us. It was arranged as per our understanding of it- spatially, through our ‘familiar’ and the ‘strange’, texts and signage inscribed on the space. The arrangements of the images for us, were our tentative meanderings through the space.

To create the second wall, we took the first set of 80 images back to the local photographers as well as some other residents of the area and asked then to choose four photographs that they identified with in any which way as being their space- their Khirki. The order of arrangement on the wall (a miniature of which was used outside) was also theirs according to their varied associations with their chosen images.

A movement from the first two walls that has grown through the loop and logic of the work would go on to create the third wall- an eye looking at and looking from the first two positions.

For the final work, the fourth wall (accompanied by sound and video loops) would be left blank with just the photo cards of all the initial 80 pictures (also on the first wall) and some texts (of conversations with people/ their experience of taking photographs/ playing with them et al) clustered together for a larger ‘public’ to come and play with. How would they like to create the fourth blank wall and with which images? They however, cannot remove an earlier placement done on the same wall by the player who came before them. We are looking at the fourth wall as a kind of a ‘picture game’ where one has to keep adding on (and cannot repeat) the layers of images put up by other people. Once all the 80 images are on the wall, this space is dismantled and the journey begins again. The first static wall and the fourth, will be kept in opposition to each other.

Ruchika Negi
Amit Mahanti
Subhashim Goswami
Aastha Chauhan

The Resident photographers are:-
Kamal
Laxmi Thapa
K.T
Dinesh