I must have been in my teens when I watched a documentary about Varanasi. The images of the river Ganges fascinated me. I was stunned by its complex role: from people’s ritual and early morning bathing, to washing their laundry while sewage was released into it, to carrying the ash of dead bodies while cow carcasses float past and fish are being caught. I scribbled it on my list of go-to places. When I received the residency nomination in late 2019, it felt like a blessing that I would stay in the holy city, destination for pilgrims from all over India and beyond. Varanasi, or Kashi or Benares, is the city of light. And after having worked with light installations of discarded LED laptop screens for three years, it seemed the light led me to this place.
2020 began with the residency at the Alice Boner Institute. I spent an amazing and fortunate January and February abroad in great company before the pandemic hit India and the world. Now I sit at my desk in London, wrapped in a scarf that I bought in Varanasi. The shop where I found it was tucked away in a courtyard, with the house bordering a huge demolition site the size of two football fields, surrounding the Vishwanath Temple. Three hundred residential houses had been demolished by the council to create a corridor to provide pilgrims access to the temple and the river near the Manikarnika Ghat with newly built facilities along the way. I had climbed a pile of rubble behind the Nepalese temple to access this open area. Strolling around, I came across pieces of broken walls in various pinks and blues, sandstone edgings with floral carvings and well-trodden doorsteps. I imagined narrow alleyways beyond with crooked paving stones and small piles of rubbish, cows and shops, children and pilgrims, scooters and bikes, and the usual flocks of tourists, all of this wiped away and turned over here. I stepped into the few small temples from which I could have descended into an existing alley. But I returned to the rubble field where kite strings tangled around my ankles, intent on their new role as a trip hazard. Since the strings kept forcing themselves onto me (so it seemed), I decided to put them in my pocket. Only then did I notice a policeman guarding the area. Anxious I might get told off for being here, I began chatting to another man who had spotted me first. This way I ended up in a shop looking at piles of scarfs with no money in my pockets. Returning several weeks later, I found myself unable to access the area.
Soon after my arrival at the institute I delved into the streets. The visual play of gestures and winks, the whirls of currents from sudden turns and evasive manoeuvres, the flapping and light touch of saris, scarfs and tarpaulin, underlaid by a slowness that seemed to seep like thick syrup from every corner and old building, made the ground on which I moved sticky with chai and the air thick with chatter. I immersed myself in this motion of human and animal bodies, of tuk tuks and bikes, of hands preparing and repairing, stirring and turning. This sensual world full of manual labour and gestures pulled me under a blanket that seemed to be filled with a century old erotic.
Godauliya Lanka Road was like an inert river that moved bodies, vehicles and goods parallel to the Ganges, downstream, towards the Dashaswamed Ghat, and past the queue of people outside the Vishwanath Temple, and further to the busy Rabindranath Tagore Road. And if I turned left here, I would come to the Muslim area with the fantastic weavers. And if I cycled straight on, I would get to the old railway station and further to Rajghat. Located in a lush campus of old trees next to the river was the Rajghat Besant School run by the Krishnamurti Foundation. I feel lucky to have had a chance to stay and work with students and staff who were a true inspiration. Running a workshop and giving a talk in that environment taught me new perspectives I had not considered before. I hope I was of some use to them, too. Having this unusual amount of time on my hands without the pressure of producing new work with a specific goal, made me consider what, apart from time, I had to hand regardless of the support and facilities that slowly developed over the duration of my stay. My London pace had come to a forced halt early on during my walks though the city. I had brought watercolours and paper, a few books I wanted to read, and I collected what’s freely available, perhaps to everyone in Varanasi: twigs and branches from trees and bushes, things I found along the banks of the river. I spent time on the roof reading, sketching and observing the colourful paper kites -Patang- dancing like a shoal of fish in the air, twitching, jerking, then a sudden dive to cut off another kite’s string. They would grow in number towards the afternoon, or anytime the wind picked up. I would hear the paper rattle in the air and the excited shouts when a kite had been cut down — Kapadia!
The strings came in different colours and grades. Some strings were simply strong, taking up the main part of the spool and kite string. Others had a vicious glass coating to cut kites’ strings or — if we were not watching out for them — would cut across our faces or necks when we were riding on scooters. When I and my fellow residents at the institute walked along the ghats or the sandbank on the other side of the river, we would regularly get entangled in kite string that turned us into involuntary clowns who, with every step, carried various items along in a trail. The way that materials relate to each other but don’t belong to each other got me thinking about provisional fixes that often become permanent. In combination with the erotic I found in the everyday, it seemed to magically form a new object with new potential like grafting that combines the qualities of two different varieties of plant.
From the beginning, I wanted to keep any new work simple. After a while I found myself assembling small objects from my collected materials that I translated into brass casts at Jnana-Pravaha, Centre of Cultural Studies and Research later on. I played with different textures and directions of growth in the twigs and sticks, these connected through thread, wax and twine that I wrapped, stuck, taped or bound to join them. I enveloped Ganga soil in newspaper and tied it with strings. I tapped into a creators’ language based on craft and making. It is something I relate to through my material and process-orientated practice, with metal casting being a central part of it for several years now. I had researched the (traditional) metal casting industry of Varanasi, and expressed my interest in working with and learning from local craftsmen prior to arriving at ABI. The first foundry we—Anoop and I—visited was in the front room on the ground floor of a residential building in a narrow alleyway. The room was filled with smoke halfway down the wall. The two guys working there used a self-prepared oil bound sand, a fine sand from the river refined with motor oil, that produced grey smoke that surely wasn’t healthy for anyone’s lungs. In the corner of the room stood the furnace, and above it more smoke. It was run on hard coal and held a crucible with orange glowing metal. That day, their alloy wasn’t quite right, since they mainly used scrap metal of inconsistent quality. To resolve the shrinkage problem they encountered that day, they cut up and fed an old brass cauldron into the pot of molten metal. It was a simple, beautiful cauldron and painful to watch it being taken apart.
Within that hazardous environment lay a beauty of tonal colours. While everything was coated with a blackish-brownish tan, the muted colours of the cold green wall, a colourful poster of Ganesh and a few other bits and pieces, showed through from beneath. Their continuous workflow, the manual repetition of preparing, stacking, pouring, opening and breaking out the moulds, kept us on our small plastic chairs, watching and chatting about technical matters and materials we use in our different set-ups. They worked without rush and at a steady pace, minimising the risk of harm to their bare feet or body as they had no PPE whatsoever. Their set-up didn’t allow for what I had in mind (and yes, I was concerned about my lungs), so a few days later we visited the traditional foundry at Jnana-Pravaha to discuss both my project and that of Filip Haag, one of my fellow residents from Switzerland.
The centre of Jnana-Pravaha was a fifteen-minute bike ride from the institute and it felt good to be another person among many in traffic making their way from one place to another, merging with the dust and noise on the road. I had adjusted my saddle to a comfortable height, inadvertently making sure my head poked out above the mass of cyclists. The foundry technicians rode to work by bike too, and Ganesh (who I would work with most days) had a small grey tote bag for his lunch swinging from his handlebars.
The elaborate multi-part sand moulds that Ganesh helped me to prepare for my objects translated most of the textures from the twigs, the fine lines from the thread and twine, down to my fingerprints on wax joints, into a series of brass casts. I was really surprised by the detail we achieved. The traditional materials used were a pleasure to work with: bees wax, fine mud and clay, raw cotton and rice husk, sugar cane molasses and a fine sand Ganesh used to dry with the remaining heat of the furnace. The sand became seemingly liquid; bubbling up, releasing excess moisture and changing its colour to a brick red. We poured the sand on the swept concrete floor to cool, then made a trough in the centre of the pile, added sugar cane molasses to it and started working it in like preparing a dough. Making sure there were no lumps was a laborious and sweaty affair. The gloopy, pitch-black molasses was of low viscosity and had a pleasant fruity smell that lingered in the air. For lunch we sat between the beds in the vegetable garden looking out on the river and the metallic green and blue birds that gathered in small groups along the fences. After lunch we shared our sweets with Ganesh, that Filip or I had bought around the corner. We could not have deep conversations with each other, my Hindi and Ganesh’s English were far too basic, so we relied on Google Translate. Most of the time it did a good job, but it amplified amusing glitches, and other things got lost entirely. Leaving the foundry at the end was not without the promise to return and work together again, which now seems in doubt considering the current situation with Covid-19. Towards the end of my residency after having successfully cast a series of brass objects that I went on to finish in my London studio, I gave a talk about my light works at the Alice Boner Institute. It was a tribute to what had brought me to the city of light in the first place presenting a completely different side of my practice that focusses on site-responsive light installations and interventions that I would not have been able to share in Varanasi otherwise. A high-light at the very end of my stay was also the annual Dhrupad music festival that brought well-known musicians to Tulsi Ghat. Till the early mornings we were listening to traditional instruments and the highly refined ways of singing, partly unable to leave due to a massive downpour that flooded almost the entire tent, and partly due to the pleasant company, the chai, the music and the mild nights. All these memories outweighed the challenging experience from the first night at the festival with a PA system producing terrible distortions of what was presented on stage following the principle loud is good, more is better. I had also slipped deeper into my yoga practice in the morning, and laughed tears over lunch when we had Swiss chocolate or sweets from shops in the old part of town for dessert, and sometimes we had both. At ABI and along the way I met fantastic people from different parts of the world who were generous with their time and knowledge.
London was a good preparation for Varanasi — cycling here or there is not so different. However, Varanasi is more organic, less organised by traffic rules and light systems. Studies show that it is the most efficient transport system in the world with more individuals being transported than anywhere else. The growing number of cars is the only problem. They are too big, they block the roads, slow movement down, and take the fun away. Cars are like the plastic wrapping in supermarkets: a protective skin, a bubble that separates you from the other, that cuts you off from direct, sensual experience, and the shouting, the dust and the sun. Meanwhile the sensual feast, the hustle and bustle continues in Varanasi’s streets.