Remember that laughing baby video that went viral some years ago? How listening to the laughter was enough to make you laugh, giggle, or at least smile indulgently? Laughter is a definite turn on, across age, class, and sex boundaries.
Even though co-creators Aravind Murali and Jai Shankar Iyer, would like their brainchild Lafeteria to be beyond definition, they do say that the project celebrates the most fundamental human expression – joy and laughter.
Lafeteria is an experience involving the sounds of laughter, and the café becomes a space where laughter is an installation. It has a temporary abode at Ashvita, the restaurant off Radhakrishnan Salai.
Walk into the whitewashed art gallery space at Ashvita, sit on a couch and just listen to the sounds that surround you. A hee from here, a haw from there, uncontrollable giggling that hits you from the right and a clearly female voice that trills away happily from your left
“Sit here for a bit,” Aravind says, “experience the sounds.” Slowly the laughter creeps into you, and the jaded journalist slips into a smile.
As people who compose music for a living, sounds fascinate Aravind and Iyer. “I was working on something and I figured that laughter got me going too. That’s where this idea originated.”
They took that to Ashvin Rajagopalan, gallery owner and restaurateur who helped set up the installation in his gallery.
“Now art has gone beyond the canvas,” says Ashvin, who is promoting Lafeteria. Laughter is a work of art here, as well as an experience for the individual. However, the wonder of Lafeteria is that it can go beyond these eight walls, and like water, find its own level in any space it is introduced into. “I guess it could work in a mobile store, a television store or in a mall,” he explains. Plans are afoot to open up, crowd source laughter and take the show to Delhi and Mumbai too.
“We have kept it deliberately minimalistic,” Aravind said. The whitewashed walls have the letters of the alphabet spilling across them, like a peal of laughter creeping up. Sixteen concealed speakers run in loops laughter clips, recorded from about a 100 people.
The sounds themselves were recorded at the duo’s music studio where they set up a fish tank with Garra Rufa, or the nibble fish of pedicure fame.
Every one who visited had to dunk their feet into the tank and while giggling was optional, the nibbling action of the fish made it sort of natural.
These sounds were recorded, edited, and set in the loop.
There are about 10-20 people who walk in every day, and every one has a different experience. “Some people are laughing along, but yes, some people don’t get it. They come and ask us what this is all about,” Aravind says.
That too is what this is about. Like a true work of art, make what you will of it, once the artist is done. The show which was inaugurated on September 1, is running its last week at Ashvita.
Its creators and promoters have great plans for Lafeteria. It will move on, and grow infectiously, much like laughter itself.
