Marrigje has been my fellow artist-in-residence in Kathmandu for a few months. She's now back home in the Netherlands and I will miss our chats and her insightful comments. Before going, though, she gave a talk at a local art school: During the last ten years, she's traveled through China, Laos, Thailand and Mongolia photographing interiors whose inhabitants are felt but rarely seen. In her monastery kitchens (the place between everyday life and religious life, as she put it), the pots, the hobs, the smoked walls, all speak of daily routines and the people who perform them and, in turn, are shaped by them. (She's also photographed Louise Bourgeois's kitchen and Brancusi's atelier. I wonder how those shaped them.) She came to Nepal with a new pinhole camera, a beautiful wooden box whose outcomes are as unpredictable as potentially rewarding. Exposure times vary between ten minutes and two hours. As she explained, that changes the rules of the game. There is no 'decisive moment'. Photography becomes a time-based medium, a literal layering of moments. Other technical peculiarities of her pinhole camera bring the results closer to human vision. There is no depth of field, everything is softly in focus at once. Since there is no lens, there are no perspective distortions. And it registers exactly what our eyes see without the interference of the brain, which by default does things like straightening the image. On the other hand, the longer exposure produces a colour shift, as the layers in the negative are allowed some chemical party time. A final bonus about her new camera is that local people think it's some kind of toy. Take out of your bag a Hasselblad, set it up and you've already changed the feeling of the place. Take out a wooden lensless camera and people will keep business as usual, if anything amused by this European lady and her funny wooden box.
You can see more of Marrigje's photos at http://www.takeadreamforawalk.com/ Here's a new sculpture, made together with a family of steel furniture makers in Patan. I'll probably call it Gara, a Nepali word for a terraced field. Alexis Jakubowicz (b. 1986 in Lyon) is a French art critic who has been a regular contributor to Libération and Art Press since 2009. He also happened to visit Nepal last month as the final stage in his 7-month trip around South America and South East Asia. He came to see me at my residency studio and we chatted about his trip, my work, what Nepali art is up to and Miquel Barceló. (He recently interviewed Barceló and saw a parallel with my work and my interest in materiality. Needless to say, I rather liked Alexis.) He also gave a talk at Siddhartha Art Gallery titled '200 days away from home: being an art critic in a global village'. After meeting artists, curators and dealers in 11 countries (Perú, Bolivia, Chile, Cambodia, Lao, Vietnam, etc.) he came back with a sense that the Western art world cannot afford to ignore what's going on in so many countries. The future centres of the art world, he said, will be in the South. Places like Sao Paulo, Dubai, Singapore, Mumbai or Mexico will take over from New York. Going through his slides, which showed selected (and exciting) art pieces and art practices from the countries he visited, he built a strong case against the uninformed Western dismissal of the developments in those areas of the world. "Cambodia? There's nothing going on there." Not so. The narrow Western European and American horizon leaves all these up-and-coming future capitals for the arts out, and us out from them. That's exactly how Albertine De Galbert, a friend of Alexis's and also a French art critic, felt after visiting many Latin American countries and realising the strength of the art produced there and the lack of connection between practitioners from neighbouring countries. As a response, she started an online resource called artesur.org that does just that: connect the Latin American art world. Or as they put it "to guide art lovers and professionals into the multitude of artistic ways, techniques, events, and exhibition spaces of this region." Alexis's talk clearly resonated with the local art crowd that came to listen to him. Art fairs and biennials in Mumbai, Dubai or China feel closer and more relevant to them than the Western biennials. The challenge for them, though, may be how to develop a local language that counters the effects of economic globalization, always ready to flatten cultural differences and favour recognisable, copycat aesthetic approaches.
Over the last few months I've been photographing examples of containment in Kathmandu, as a general category of everyday material actions and contraptions. Coincidentally, I've just returned from London, where I saw two very different kinds of show that, in one way or another dealt with this notion. The first one was Richard Deacon's new show at Lisson Gallery. As is the case with some of his sculptures, the idea of a central void, bound and made present by the body of the piece, could be felt in Congregate, a stainless steel work shown in the courtyard: On a very different note, Damien Hirst's retrospective at Tate Modern reminds us what a good patron of the guild of vitrine makers he is. Here, his work doesn't attempt to contain and give entity to the void à la Deacon, rather it is the work's vacuousness that seems to be in need of containment in order for it not to dissipate entirely. Be that as it may, here are some Nepali examples of containment and enclosure. Had you walked into my studio two weeks ago, you would have seen this: And if you popped in today, it would look more like this: This is easily going to be my largest post so far, but maybe the image below will justify it for you as much as it did for me. This wooden chariot is Rato (Red) Machhendranath's temple chariot. Machhendranath is the Nepali Hindu god that protects the Kathmandu Valley and controls the rains and the monsoon. The people of Patan, who often mix Hindu and Buddhist beliefs without batting an eyelid, also consider him an incarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of compassion. The crucial part is Machhendranath's control over the rains. If you want a good crop, you have to build him a towering temple chariot and pull it by hand through the streets of Patan. (As I write this, it's already pouring down. Result.) I had heard stories about how much taller the chariot used to be and how people had been crushed to death by its fall. Nowadays, the height is capped to avoid accidents, but the chariot and its construction still kept me geekily hooked, following the progress and asking too many questions. The smiley man in the blue cap below, Rameswar, not only answered them all, but also invited us to have dinner with his family to celebrate the completion of the chariot. Thanks again, Rameswar. The chariot is made of wood, bamboo (used as ropes to tie up and cover the structure), steel (wheel axes) and natural fiber ropes. The majority of hard parts get replaced every twelve years, some every six. The structure starts going up, following a plan fine-tuned through generations. The chariot makers are all volunteers and their knowledge is handed down from father to son. Bamboo strips are brutally and beautifully woven around the wooden structure. Next, the wheels go in. And then the ropes to control the tilt of the whole tower. More trunks are added to cover the basic structure, and the wheels and the main platform are painted in a reddish orange. A few miles of bamboo strips and a gilded temple fascia complete the coverage of the structure. And in case you needed more visual kudos, here's a huge trunk in the shape of a giant ski to front the chariot. The final touches are added while the crowd gathers to celebrate the end of the construction process. The chariot is used in the same location as a temporary temple for a couple of days. And then it's time to move it - or at least try. E la nave va. Day by day, sneaking around the city streets. The procession can take weeks, but there's no hurry. Every night, wherever the chariot stops, a holy place springs up. Sculpture, performance, social/relational art, faith and rain. Materiality and spirituality still getting on. To buy sheet metal and long rods, you go to a hardware yard and hop your way through characterfully unstable piles of metal. You find a delivery guy, let him strap everything onto his pick-up bike and then sit on top, ready to be pedaled to your studio together with your shopping. To buy clay, you go to a town full of potters (like Bhaktapur) and ask one of them to divert some of his stash to your rucksack. To buy plywood, you repeat the circus act explained above. For smaller stuff, you get yourself a bike. I'm finally in my residency studio at the Kathmandu Contemporary Arts Centre. Loads of space and a massive adjacent garden with views onto the nearby pagodas in Durbar Square. I'm still impressed, no matter how many times I've been there. The garden and the studio are at the back of Patan Museum. Here's a view of the museum's entrance on Durbar Square: And here's a walk-through video that takes you from a local cafe in the square all the way into my studio: Yesterday was Navavarsha, the Nepali New Year's Day. The Nepalese follow their own calendar system, known as the Bikram Era or Bikram Sambat and based on the lunar and solar calendars. The actual day in their calendar is 1st of Baisakh (a month that straddles April and May). Unlike Gregorian months, the lengths of Nepali months are not predetermined, and change from year to year, varying from 29 days to 32 days. (Thanks, Google.) So off we went to Patan's Durbar Square, to hang around and see what the locals do. Namely: sit around in the sun, drink, carry around some portable shrines and generally be mellow.
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Robert Cervera Amblar
Sculpture, installation, writing. Archive:
July 2013
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