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.