Day 5, Sunday, Jan 18 2009, Transformative Actions, Cubbon Park, Bangalore
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009Documentation of Transformative Actions at http://www.creativeactions.com/BANGALORE_2008/index.html
In the first week of the collaborative, public exercises, one of many proposed interventions was conducted at Cubbon Park on Sunday January 18th. Along with students of Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology the artists invited and offered people to take part in transformative actions at a selected site in the park.
The students drew a map of Cubbon Park to invite and show the public their suggestions for a self-guided tour of creative expressions in public space. The map wasn’t really necessary for the public, cause people joined the transformative actions right away. Mostly men joined, cause they are the majority represented in public space, and women tend to keep back, and await allowance from their men to interact. In terms of the group’s working methods the Charter/Map was important in terms of coordinating and understanding our own actions taking place in the city as stage.
“Sunday afternoon we invited people by the rock and bamboo area to participate in braiding the space with colorful fabrics - Opening and transforming the site into a joyful space for connectedness across cultural and lingual barriers. Opening for conversations between the sexes. We invited people to tie ‘wishing’ bangels and bells onto the fabric lanes to make wishes for positive understanding and sensitivity between people. Everyone participating all at the same time made sound with the bangels and bells.
The intervention created a temporary space for new ways of dialogue between strangers in public space. The day finished with the participants going in female couples to the shady bamboo grove near the park entrance thus visualizing the necessity of a site for female lesbians too, as the site is already a spot for gays.”
One of the exercises carried out at the site on Friday 16 also included female students making a meditation sitting on the rocks in a circle, creating space for inner body-experiences, meditating on their personal imaginative animal. Afterwards they turned their bodies facing the surroundings looking out and started braiding each others’ hair two and two as an act of reclaiming public space in their own feminine way.
In performing these transformative actions, the participants wish to challenge the predominant ways in which the city is experienced partly due to cultural and religious conditioning.
In terms of having consistant value for the society in Bangalore the transformed site could have been used during Sunday evening and the following days for more transformative actions focusing on the sexual-self versus the religious/cultural gendered-self and having discussions with ngo-groups keeping the dialogue with the attracted public, which were mainly being men.
Other transformative actions that we talked about doing this Sunday, which could be great to do at another occasion:
- The girl students playing loud music from their mobile phones while hanging out near the trees and walking the area, thus taking over a usual male act in the park.
- Asking passing by women to write a note on where they feel fearful/joyful in public space in the day/night. They would then be asked to hang bangles and bells at this place as a ritual transformation from fear to joy.
- The student girls climbing and sitting in the trees, copying usual male acts.
The gathering of artists and students went on into other city interventions…experimenting with more methods in terms of creating “inclusive, creaitve, participatory spaces” in the public realm.
See the following posts…
Documentation of Transformative Actions at http://www.creativeactions.com/BANGALORE_2008/index.html