Site-specific art or art inspired by spaces has ample possibilities for fresh interpretation. The history, geography, social parameters and real-time situations of the place provide for divergent and direct expression. Kochi and its spaces are rich on those accounts believes British artist-lecturer Christine Marfleet, on her maiden visit to the city.
Christine is on a recce of the city and its spaces as she prepares to head a four-week art residency programme scheduled for the year end and one that has some city locales at the core of its art development. The project is organised and convened by the Kerala Museum of History and Art, Edappally.
A senior lecturer in Theatre Design at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff, Christine took time off to pursue a Masters degree in Art Practice in 2010. “I decided to take a year out in order to experience Fine Arts because my background is all theatre and drama,” she says.
As a teacher of theatre design for the past 20 years Christine has seen the change that has come into the subject per se. It has widened from its traditional focus on stage and related techniques to incorporate varied art practices and critical thinking. “It now involves the whole of dramaturgy,” says Christine.
Her current project, which is in an inchoate stage, finds Christine putting all these pieces together. “My work will be about bringing together text, active, derelict or disused spaces and exploring them,” she explains. The two sites that Christine and the organisers of the Kerala History Museum have zeroed in on are the Tower Bridge in Mattancherry and the Old Harbour Station in Willingdon Island.
“The bridge was a noisy onslaught of mopeds and those wonderful climbing pieces of steel bending with heat…the verticality of space…” recalls Christine, completely charged by the antiquity and the real-time feel of the bridge built in 1930s. “There could be a possible sound installation,” she hazards a guess. A visit to the station too was a poignant experience for her. “Its derelict state and its palpable past as a place of extreme joy and pain, has its own story,” she says.
The possible text which she plans to marry with these spaces is excerpts from Sangam literature, a body of Tamil literature. But this is still in planning stage.
In the text inspired spatial art that Christine conceptualises she finds encouragement from the works of French philosophers Gaston Bachelard, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, the originator of deconstruction.
“In our collaboration I hope we too can “write” with space, to create new art works as “other” places derived from the richness of our chosen sites, ancient poetry and a context of Kochi’s place on the old Silk Route,” says Christine.
At this formative stage the project will have eight resident artists who will work individually and in collaboration under Christine. To the project she wishes to contribute in text and with sculptural models in 3D. Christine enjoys text enormously and has written for puppetry and some poetry to go with her sculptural work.
As an artist and as a layman Christine wandered around the city, finding Broadway to be a narrow way, people being kind in the heat and in a hardware shop she fed her obsession of collecting everyday objects by buying brooms, mop cloths and ladle spoons!
She is charged by the city and by her project. “At the moment it is all terrifying and interesting.” The installations and art works are scheduled to be exhibited at the Museum in mid-January.
