At 7.35 p.m. on December 2 in Rome, at Piazza Della Repubblica, a 40-foot container opened its doors for the public to walk in. In its pitch blackness, the temperature drops to single digits and the steady croak of cicadas fills the air.
A machine drones in the distance, and its rumbles soften to the sound of air whooshing out a quick escape. These noises loop for a while, until silence takes over. It breaks to the sound of someone gasping desperately for breath. Within the container unveil photographs of a run-down desolate factory, and the stoic faces of Bhopalis.
Thirty years ago, at 7.35 p.m. Italian time, 12.05 a.m. Indian time, 42 tonnes of methyl isocyanate leaked out of a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, taking 2,259 lives in its immediate wake and thousands ever since. In this photo-installation container, Bhopal — A Silent Picture , activist-artist Samar Singh Jodha recreates for visitors the quiet disaster of that night. From India to London and Venice, the piece has travelled world over from its creation in 2009, and now roosts in Rome courtesy Amnesty International, Italy.
The roots of the piece found soil five years earlier though, in 2004, when Samar was invited by BBC to create a print work of Bhopal as it stood, then 20 years from the tragedy. “I was able to meet and photograph communities that lived around the plant, doctors who were there that night, machine operators, police officers in charge then, and numerous others. I always knew of the Bhopal gas tragedy, but it was only with these meetings that my knowledge from a distance grew into a wider sense of understanding,” says Samar in a telephone conversation from Rome.
With five years of photographing the people and the place, by 2009, Samar decided to pull all the work that he’d been doing into a cohesive whole.
His forays into Bhopal had often been by train; many of his meetings with survivors too had been at railway stations, and he’d also heard of people who’d lost their lives in trains that passed through Bhopal that night. The idea of a train journey into Bhopal became a metaphor to lead people into a great cognisance of the tragedy, and Bhopal — A Silent Picture replicates the experience of chugging into Bhopal at night through sound, ambience and visuals. “The work is a sensory experience, and the show itself is a quiet one, for there wasn’t too much noise that night, and after 30 years of people shouting themselves hoarse about it, the silence of the experience itself speaks louder.”
In its travels, over a lakh people have walked through the container and engaged with it in different ways. When in Mumbai, at the 2011 Kala Ghoda festival, Samar recalls school children who never quite understood what “25,000 people dead” meant, but reacted to what they experienced by drawing pictures of dead birds in backyards, contaminated water around their homes, and other instances of industrial pollution, corporate irresponsibility and environmental damage. At the London Olympics in 2012, Samar modified the installation itself to include 35 mannequins wrapped in a 40-feet-long black shroud with the names of hundreds of those who had died in Bhopal.
In Venice, Samar speaks of the piece resonating with Italians because the city, for all its romance, sits on one of the world’s most polluted water bodies that has silently hurt its people through unexplained illnesses for years. “Bhopals happen all across the planet. When there’s a blowout like at the Union Carbide plant, we see a smoking gun culprit; but in less dramatic situations worldwide, our water is being poisoned, and our food is being contaminated. When it is a slow process of destruction, we often have no idea of what is killing us even. And that’s what we’ve let our world become in the hands of corporates. We’ve turned our planet into a lab and we are merely rats in an experiment.”
Bhopal - A Silent Picture remains open in Rome till December 6.
