This mural at the Cubbon Park Metro Station is hard to miss. It’s striking, expansive, and earthy. The brown, which makes up most of the artwork, is coloured with mud. The mural isn’t merely decorative; it tells the story of the well-digging community (bhovi or mannu vaddar) in Bengaluru. It’s a result of Art In Transit (AIT) and Biome Environmental Trust’s (BET) Namma Ooru Namma Neeru project, which combines art and ecology.
On September 4, both teams celebrated the culmination of the project that involved artists, poets, well-diggers, ecologists, and government officials.
BET conceived the ‘One Million Wells for Bengaluru Initiative’ to underscore the importance of harvesting rainwater and digging recharge wells. As a part of this initiative, well-diggers dug 65 recharge wells in Cubbon Park. AIT, Design Earth, and placeARTS Youth Collective gathered the mud from these wells and worked with students of Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology and commuters at Cubbon Park Metro Station to paint the mural. Multilingual poetry collective Kavya Sanje helped highlight the histories of the well-digging community through the mural.
“Commuters at Cubbon Park Metro walk up to the mural and touch it - curious about what it is made of. This became an entry point to talk about Bengaluru’s water,” said Arzu Mistry, who heads AIT.
For more information about the project visit, artintransitbangalore.com . To know more about recharge wells, go to bengaluru.UrbanWaters.in
Published - September 05, 2021 04:34 am IST
