| |
METROSCAPE
Collaborative Lass
Italian designer
and architect Tarshito Nicola Stripoli, has been busy rearranging world
geography. His designer map of South America has Columbia, Brazil and
other Amazon-enriched countries ... but look towards the south and you
have, well, the Indian peninsula dissolving in a new space. (Another pleasing
continental mutation sees north India entering south Italy with Sicily
appearing as a Sri Lankan prototype.) Meanwhile, the personalised atlas
can be found on the body of a Chrysler station wagon (Stripoli's own,
lying in native Bari in Italy), the cut-out of a human body (also Stripoli's
own) and the shell of a movable terracotta turtle that Stripoli has made
with students from Delhi's College of Art and master potter Jagdish Pandit
from Bihar. "I hate man-made boundaries and divisions," says
the neo-cartographer who first came to India as a student in 1978, "I
want to create a fantasy world where all this doesn't matter."
|
|
|
|
RE-MAPPING THE WORLD: Stripoli with
his beeswax pillars; terracotta turtle with a world map on its shell
|
The fantasy ... and the philosophy continues.
In a major collaborative exhibition at Delhi's Crafts Museum (on till
May 31) curated by Italian journalist Daniella Bezzi, Stripoli displays
artworks that have the distinctive blessings of the postmodern dictum-simply
to disobey convention and stretch the limits ingenuity. For his frontier-free,
love-all, speak-well postulates, Stripoli had used craftspersons from
all over India to help influence some gripping images done in cloth, terracotta,
beeswax, paper, stone and wood. For most of the works, like the tapestries
done in Lambada, Kantha and Sujni embroidery, Stripoli usually gave an
iconic blueprint (a crusading Warrior of Love, an outline of himself),
to craftspersons, like those attached to crafts outfit Dastakar, but left
the remaining conceptualisation in their hands.
So any inspiration from the other Italian artist
Francesco Clemente, regarded as one of the original founders of the Indian
collaborative cauldron? Stripoli is dismissive: "Who cares about
him ... he has never shown in India." A bit evasive, that.
-Anshul Avijit
Simply Sufi
|
|
|
If you look at this picture, you might understand
why auditoriums might just begin to lose money. Even if this is not the
Humayun's Tomb but an agreeably decrepit quarter just next to it. Jahan-e-Khusrau,
a two evening concert organised in Delhi last week by filmmaker, painter
and now cultural impresario Muzaffar Ali offered an authentically medieval
backdrop, starched divans with bolsters, gilauti kebabs with Awadhi biryani
and of course the fiery intonations of Abida Parveen who shook the ruins
with her edition of Amir Khusrau's Tori soorat balihari, Chaap tilak and
the concluding Aaj rang hai ri. Although Delhi's newly Khusrau-crazed
public can't seem to have enough of the Pakistani singer (she's been here
at least thrice in the past four months), Ali also added more international
flavour by inviting a group of Tunisian and Iranian musicians who first
went alone and later doubled as Parveen's accompanying orchestra. Befitingly
it was dhrupad maestro Fahimuddin Dagar who inaugurated the concert with
Khusrau's Qual. Hardly anyone moved ... except to clap.
-Anshul Avijit
|
|
METRO TODAY
Web
Exclusives