Broken Atlas

(Photo: Sundeep Bali)

Travelling in rural West Africa, one never fails to notice how often a tree serves as communal gathering place. A baobab or mango tree, say, sometimes flowering there alone, several hundred metres or more from its closest neighbour; and beneath it, sheltered from the Sahelian heat, there will be a school class, or elders debating a development proposal, or men politicking, or women assembling to complain of their men’s politicking. And sometimes a tree is simply something in whose shade you drink, eat and tell stories.

I was reminded of this image of the tree as a sort of nourishing community architecture when I first encountered photographs of Sanjeev Shankar’s public art piece Jugaad (picture above). Commissioned for last December’s 48°C Public.Art.Ecology festival in New Delhi, Jugaad is a 750-sq foot shade canopy fashioned from a thousand oil cans lashed together, installed with halogens, suspended over pulleys and fastened to the ground with steel cables. The skins of the oil cans were punctured with holes, and the lids applied with a locally available pink pigment called gulal.

(Photo: Sundeep Bali)

The piece was produced in collaboration with the residents of Rajokri, an urban village on the outskirts of Delhi. For Shankar it was an opportunity to further his explorations in the recycling and the re-purposing of used materials—rendering art out of what was once garbage—while engaging in a deeply personal process with the villagers.

28-year-old Shankar was trained as an architect/designer, but nowadays works mostly on projects that challenge the conventions of his vocation, focusing especially on how art and craft can be used to examine the way humans make decisions about living and consuming. In previous initiatives he explored the unique role of the street food vendors in the social and economic fabric of Indian cities, hypothesized “the design of a green, intelligent, modular and structural ‘brick’ which has specific native plants or seeds integrated with it,” and, while living with tribes on the Indian-Burmese border developed cane and bamboo craft-products inspired by Naga culture. He also developed what he calls “Culture Specific Footwear”—dashingly hybrid modern-traditional shoes.

The far-ranging purview of his work may betray a certain intellectual unruliness, but core themes emerge: sustainability, biomimetics, emergent technologies, the dynamics of social change, ingenuity in the face of limited resources, and the necessary viability of craft cultures. Somehow he manages to eloquently mash many if not all of these interests into singular articulations.

I was serendipitously introduced to Shankar recently thanks to a last-minute magazine assignment. That will be only a brief piece, but I enjoyed our chat via Skype so much that it seemed worthwhile to share our discussion here.

Cf.: Tell me how the Jugaad project got started.

Sanjeev Shankar: For me it began with the process of simply documenting lives. Taking photographs of people, or using film, I’m always interested how people make decisions about living and consuming, how the planet is evolving…never as part of an agenda. Just as part of my interest in spending time with people.

I’m baffled by the extremes that India in particular brings out most vividly. Drive for two hours and the differences are shocking. The city [as we think of it] is a Western idea. In India you had villages and the city just grew up around them. For example, in Delhi you’ll still come across buffaloes. There’s a sense of time and space that is very different.

So I was simply taking pictures and I ended up with a series related to the oil can. Most things in India tend to get re-used at every single stage, but the oil can was a kind of dirty symbol of waste which should not be touched or tampered with. It was usually discarded as waste, or used as a container to hold waste, filthy stuff.

There was a seed, or a germ, to do something. Find out what happens to the oil can. I kept stalking the oil can! It took me to some really crazy places… So that was my trigger, I felt this may not be the only way it could be used. And while I was playing with this idea, it evolved into something that engaged a lot of people. It went from one extreme, where people in Rajokri] would give the oil can to me for free, to how the whole village became excited and tried charging me more for the oil cans than they were previously worth.

Cf.: Once the seed for the project was planted, you knew you wanted to involve a community, to make it collaborative. What was your process?

Shankar: I didn’t know how we would do it, but I trusted the deep instinct and power of crowd behaviour. Where the whole community gets involved, everyone is engaged and stimulating everyone else. This started happening somehow.

That kind of challenge fascinates me. When you have a purpose but have to involve everyone to communicate and manifest something tangible, something that goes beyond yourself, the “I”, and really get people into it.

Cf.: You had the idea to call the project “Jugaad” only part-way through the collaboration process. What is jugaad?

Shankar: Jugaad is a Hindi term that means attaining any objective with whatever resources you have at hand. There’s a guy with 10 rupees who has a dream to own a tractor or television. He will go about thinking in a radically innovative manner to get what he wants and to do it only with whatever resources he has. It results in some absolutely insane innovation and inventions. Because money is not an issue. It takes you onto a journey.

It’s a normal and accepted way to go about life, where you say, ‘Bro’, let’s do jugaad.’ A ‘let’s do it’ attitude—no matter what happens we have to get this done. And that also results in camaraderie.

But the title [for the project] came later while brainstorming with a friend. I started with my concerns: recycling; what does it mean to re-purpose; when one thing dies and it becomes something else; and how do you involve people.

The term jugaad is a lovely way to relate to everyone. In these urban villages the language is different. You’re working with people not integrated into city life. I’m an outsider. There had to be a way without language, a way they could understand and appreciate. It’s body language, the way you conduct yourself, create a deeper purpose beyond the economy of it. Once people began to appreciate it, there was a domino effect. The word spread. Suddenly there are 100 people working and brainstorming, and I become just one part of the process.

Cf.: How difficult was it to get people on-board with the idea?

Shankar: It wasn’t easy at first. Sometimes there was resistance. No one understood what [the project] would become. They had the mindset the oil can was waste, so it goes to the dump, why touch it!

It’s one thing to talk about recycling in boardrooms, richly dressed, but it’s a totally different challenge to be working in some communities, because no one is going to listen to you, no matter how many articles we write. So my toughest challenge was how to engage people out of this circle of exchanges happening, when their main priority is survival, getting their daily meal, eating their daily bread. And a sizable population on this planet falls in this bracket.

Cf.: What sort of role did you play? How do you encourage innovation and creativity in this situation?

Shankar: There was a lot of back and forth, trial and error, and experimentation. We hadn’t even tested the material so we’d know how to work with it. A lot of village politics got into it, which you just had to accept. Sometimes you just have to give it up. You can’t dictate, you become one element in the whole collage. You learn to go with the flow then at very crucial junctures make sure the river takes an important course or reaches its destination.

Toward the end everything started tying together. Aside from issues of recycling, re-purposing, re-use, it also explored issues of human behaviour, as in when does something become beautiful. Our idea of beauty often comes from a deep sense of evolutionary instinct. In architecture or design parlance you want to rationalize it, make sure it’s functional—that’s the way we judge if something is beautiful. I knew this piece would have rustic aesthetics, but [other than that] I had no idea.

I always try to question whether design should be about “less” or should design be about “more”. Indian movies and traditional aesthetics is so much about celebrating through more, maximizing stuff. I love this dichotomy or tension between minimalism and maximalism. It’s boring if you have to insist on one way or the other. Can we fuse them to create a new entity? When do we stop fighting for our ideas and come up with something genuinely powerful and new.

Cf.: Other projects of yours have been craft-based, and you’ve written about the relationship between designers and craftspeople. Now that you’ve completed this Jugaad project, where’s your thinking on craft now?

Shankar: The relationship between design/art and craft is very important to our times, especially in India. There are millions of people here who are brilliant craftsmen; we still have to acknowledge and celebrate that. Unlike the West, we have living crafts. They’re not on the way out. You have to accept that and not look down upon it. They don’t need us, we need them.

Once you live in that life, where work is not devoid of play, you realize craft is an extension of life. It is seamlessly intertwined. Where you sing and you eat and make motors and just happen to create extraordinary shoes as an outcome of your daily routine. That’s a different process compared to a modern way of looking at life, work and play as distinct activities. Japan is a unique place that appears to strike a balance between craft and modernity.

Cf.: In recent years, there’s been an explosion in discourse around the notion of design as an instrument of social change. I’m thinking of people like Bruce Mau and Cameron Sinclair (Architecture for Humanity), both their work and things they’ve said, this sensibility, as Sinclair says, you must “Design like you give a damn.” There are many others now talking this way and it almost has the critical mass of a movement. At its best this mindset can be the trigger for some really innovative, sustainable ideas; at its worst it smacks of a kind of simple-minded utopianism that promises lasting change it can’t really deliver on its own. Do you believe your work can be transformative, and that change will be lasting?

Shankar: I’m glad you asked that question… On one side, I don’t know whether it’s prudent to be decisively judgmental that something or everything has to last! If something has to die it will die, and nature will take its own course.

But the other side of me wants it to survive and grow and so I go out and sow seeds, meeting every single person who I feel could be touched by the project and contribute to something deeper. Sowing seeds is important, whether the seed becomes a tree, a fruit, a small plant, or that seed flies out to another country and gets embedded there is something beyond me. Life takes its own course.

In the West there’s this urge to control, give definite answers. Such trends are now seen elsewhere
too. Through my journeys I’ve realized not every question has an answer. No single initiative can change the world. Remarkable people have triggered movements, but there’s always something deep and beyond that remarkable person at play. We need to acknowledge that we’re always trying to rationalize, post-analyze what’s happening.

I’m born in the East, so I’m used to the Hindu philosophy of letting things happen. You accept death, you don’t fight it. It’s not a full-stop. Such belief is at the core of life itself. Everything which comes has to go; you live life in manner where you leave no trace, or you may leave a trace but it doesn’t look like a trace.

Every input from media tells us we can change things. It’s nice to think that way, but perhaps we also need to give space. Initiate, yes; but include a variable which gives space to the other person and to the other life form, which acknowledges their presence, and which tells us we must not go beyond a certain line.

I’m always playing with these two opposite ideas and somehow it results in something.

Cf.: There’s an on-going interest in biomorphism, bio-mimicry in your work. Where does that come from?

Shankar: I was born in a south India hill station called Wellington. Every year my father would take me to the hills and we would lose ourselves in the forest. We’d run up to the top, chase each other and purposefully get lost. It made me learn about being in nature and becoming one with it.

Later, as an adult, this one time I was [sleeping] in a rainforest and I felt like I was losing the edge of my body. It was a phenomenal, magical experience. It makes you realize we create all these distinctions. When I lost the feeling of the extremities of my body I started feeling everything is the same, and everything is nothing, and nothing is everything, which started connecting me with everything else. There’s a level of communication and intelligence going on in the world of plants and animals that we don’t understand. That are so evolved and deep we have few answers for how things work.

Cf.: As I’ve only experienced the Jugaad installation through images on the internet, I wonder how it actually looked being there.

It was pretty crazy. There were strong winds at one point and the whole thing started moving. There were strange sounds coming out of it. It looked like a spaceship, like an outer-worldly creature. People [looking at it] had this insane look on their face. What is this? Where has it arrived from? It swayed like a ship in the middle of the ocean. I did not expect it to be so cool.

Cf.: Are you still in touch with the people of Rajokri?

Shankar: Yes, I still talk with them. But now our conversations go beyond the oil cans or jugaad. I
guess it is the making of yet another journey.