I’m sitting at the airport of Bogotá, Colombia. I’ve been travelling for over 25 hours from Kochi and on my way to my parents’ house in the rural areas of Santander, a mountain state in Colombia. The journey is gruelling and dizzying, and it somehow feels appropriate for writing this.
When I first arrived to Kochi several people talked about the many similarities between this region and Colombia. I was surprised. For Colombians there aren’t many references to India, mainly due to the lack of a shared colonial past. However, these similarities soon became evident.
Kerala and Colombia: you drive in crazy traffic and look out of the window as a fruit becomes a person on a bike parked next to a shop that sells toys and legalises documents. Both places have shortest sunsets anywhere in the world.
Both, football loving, tropical, both with catholic histories, both with fierce class structures, institutional corruption, and endemic sexism. Both countries with a hallucinatory wealth of images captured most notably in the literary style known as magic realism.
“Garcia Marquez is really a Malayalam author,” someone said to me. It makes sense. And yet, being in Kochi has been so utterly alien to me. I have tried to dress myself in my Colombian persona in order to navigate my weeks in this city, but I haven’t managed it at all. I resonated with the sights and the heat, but I couldn’t find myself. And then I realised it is the major difference.
People in Kochi seem to have a total absence of the everyday aggression that is so characteristic in Colombians. The intensity of Keralans seems so modulated and tempered. This explains how the noisy traffic in Kochi felt so unthreatening.
More than an exchange of attacks, the ecosystem of horns seems to be made out of reminders: “here I am, here I am”. I didn’t see one case of road rage amidst a million near-crashes.
This apparent low aggression translates most notably to Keralans gaze. I have been fascinated by the expression of attention displayed by people of the region. I’ve experienced it in conversation, and also while audiences viewed my work at the biennale in Aspinwall. It’s hard to define, it’s welcoming and curious, but also confident. It’s like someone opening the door to their house right in front of you, and then walking away in complete trust without saying a word.
The Colombian gaze on the other hand, is demanding and defiant. A defiance that I must have been sporting around during my time in Kochi and a couple of its surrounding areas. Perhaps this is the reason why I’ve felt so utterly disarmed by my encounters with people from the region. I guess this is also why I have found myself surprised to experience so little frustration as the mounting process for my artwork at the biennale, a highly technical piece, met so many obstacles. I found a way to understand our opposing intensities, and favoured the South Indian in the name of delight.
The one time I witnessed a different kind of energy happened at the opening party for this year’s Kochi-Muziris Biennale, a beautiful garden party with open bar and dance floor.
By 10 p.m. people were enraptured. The bar was almost knocked over by a pushing crowd demanding more.
The dance floor became an almost impenetrable throbbing mob, and when I finally entered it with a friend, a girl in her late 20s, the gazes towards her became threatening. I tried to get into Colombian mode in order to find enjoyment and managed to give into it, but it wasn’t easy.
For Colombians the dance floor is a sacred space ruled by measured sways of seduction and joy. As opposed to everyday life, aggression at parties in Colombia is saved for the late hours.
The next morning’s sun lifted the aggression and Kochi became tempered once again. I was happy to recognise it. It made me realise that I had made a sort of romantic bond with the city and its people.
(The writer is a Columbia-born artist who lives and works between Norway and Denmark. The article is written exclusively for The Hindu.)
