Visibility of the process

With the residency show behind me, it's time to catch up on smaller to-do items. For example, I have this bunch of photos I've been collecting under the slightly pompous title 'Visibility of the process'.

Like I mentioned in an early Nepali post, a normal pedestrian here has visual access to the innards of building works in a way that has become rare in developed countries. Think of Britain, with its panoply of hoarding arrangements to keep building sites concealed, and which are only taken down when the work is complete, as if to ensure that your first view of the 'product' is that of a finished, sealed, impenetrable entity.

Here you can read things more easily, take them apart in your mind, retrace the steps of their making. There is also more mending and making do, and more acceptance of it in the public and professional spheres.

The boundaries between the domestic, the private, the professional and the public are permeable, if at all present. Workshops are open to the street, squares double as factory yards.

All sorts of activities happen in plain view, including very graphic religious practices.

Meanwhile, back in the West, we try to reconnect with the making of things through sheep-shearing demonstrations in country fairs and knitting sessions for the trendy in some reclaimed Working Men's Club, while all sorts of post-apocalyptic movies and zombie series pose the question: If everything went tits-up, what skills you got?