MOVEMENT

Classes of things have the capacity to reflect pre-existing social groups, and ‘biographical objects’ are endowed with the personal characteristics of their users or owners. The use of an object, a personal possession, as a metaphor for the self draws us into the complicated question of the relations of persons and things. The narrative construction of identity is complexly entangled with personal possessions because of a general cultural preoccupation with the metaphoric properties of things and their use as surrogate companions. An object can thus become more than simply a ‘metaphor for the self’ says Hoskins. It becomes a pivot for reflexivity and introspection, a tool of autobiographic self-discovery, a way of knowing oneself through things.

The habitus according to Pierre Bourdieu is a structuring structure which exists only in and through the material practice of agents, a disposition to act in a particular kind of way…The house is the objectification of the habitus, which is simultaneously embodied in the practices of those who dwell in it.

The photograph made is of a part of an occupied pavement in the spatial context of Lower Parel in the city of Mumbai where space is contested. This space is simultaneously public – part of the street, and private – part of a dwelling. The material narrative within the image can be read to have two biographies – one urban and the other rural, in the context of the gentrified space of Mumbai. The photograph shows various things placed against a compound wall, which is painted from pier to pier with an image of a Goddess called Yedai Devi or Yedeshwari Devi from Yermala. The biographies can be narrated primarily through the painted image of the deity, the framed image of Ganesh above it and other objects around them. The painting has iconic, indexical and symbolic elements like the betel leaf, the small icon of Ganesh below and others. Artefacts may thus objectify aspects of the identity of the person.

The materiality of the compound wall shows three layers of spatial inhabitation along the pavement. The present occupation is indicated by the freshly painted pink wall with the image of the Devi, the layer below / before that indicated by the blue paint above is of the previous occupants to whom the Ganesh image may have belonged and who have perhaps been evicted. And the third layer of the displaced migrants indicated by the traces of the demolished hutments on either side of the pier.  The space between two piers belonged to one household or one hutment. The hutments indicated by the blue wall and those on the sides were broken due to city dynamics, these people are agrarian and perhaps wanted to settle, while the pink wall symbolises the migrating family and a rural society.

Amongst the various objects are a tuntuna (top left in the image) and a few necklaces made of cowry shells typically worn by devotees of the Goddess – a certain social group also called Jogwas. The tuntuna is a one stringed musical instrument with a cylindrical resonator, which is open on the top. The base is covered and is attached with a bamboo shaft. It is typically used in Marathi folk traditions of lavani, powada and allied forms, (commonly played in Maharashtra). It is seen in the hands of professional, wandering, religious mendicants especially Jogis (caste) who wander from village to village, city to city, singing songs in honour of the Gods on ceremonial occasions and collecting alms. Through paintings, dances and songs knowledge of the ancestral past is transmitted and re-enacted. Formal ceremonies of initiation are held to become part of this social group. When the monsoon sets in they return to their homes and spend the wet months in weaving. Everyone associated with deities are usually musicians. It’s an old saying that musicians are closest to gods, because offering happens through music. Cowry shells are viewed as symbols of womanhood, fertility, birth and wealth. Some Indians worship this shell due to its resemblance to Yoni - the iconic form of Devi the Goddess, resembling the female generative organ. These necklaces are worn by both men and women. Some of the men are also known to dress as women wearing Saris. They are forced by the society to give up being a man, suppress all desires to serve God. The women cannot get married, have children or have a life of their own. Positioned on the edge of society they are exploited, discriminated and sexually oppressed. These devotees are considered outcastes, ill-treated and sexually exploited, viewed as nothing better than (eunuchs and) prostitutes, all in the name of God. Identities and biographies are formed around objects in a tribal / rural society. The qualities of artefacts objectify the persons who make or use them. The objects are biographical; they have come to define their personal and sexual identity. Narratives can thus be constructed where the objects mediate for the person. Objects can be given a gender, name, history and ritual function. Some objects can be so closely associated with a person as to seem inalienable.

There is a dialectical and recursive relationship between persons and things. Persons make and use things and things make persons. Subject and objects are indelibly linked. Through the consideration of one, you find the other. People and their things are so complexly intertwined they cannot be disentangled.

The various objects within the spatial matrix from cooking utensils, bed sheets, a baby’s bottle, tooth paste etc placed in the niche of the wall, bags hanging on the walls, industrial thermocol containers and a green plastic crate from a wholesale flower market in the neighbourhood signify a family on the move. Being devotees of the Goddess, wherever they go, they will return to the main temple. The simulation of the main temple through the painting and the red dhurrie is a form of creating or objectifying the environment of which they are now a part. This simulates the atmosphere of a temple.

‘Space is at his disposal like a kind of distributed system, and by controlling this space he holds sway over all possible reciprocal relations between the objects therein, and hence over all the roles they are capable of assuming...instead of consuming objects, he dominates, controls and orders them. He discovers himself in the manipulation and tactical equilibration of a system.’

The so called ‘lower castes’ in India have a fetish for images, especially gods. If an image is found trashed away, it will be respectfully placed. Gods thereby begin to occupy city spaces – whether on trees or on compound walls etc. The framed image of Ganesh could have come in such a manner. Objects thereby move around and get re-contextualised. This Ganesh image is interestingly not a traditional image, but an image of the Ganesh idol worshipped by the Shrimant Dagdusheth Halwai Sarvajanik Ganpati Trust,  in Pune. It is also possible that the Jogis have come here from Pune have brought the frame with them. The devanagri text in green on the blue wall says ‘yedai’ the name of the God while the stencilled text in vermillion on the pink wall remains illegible. Osmanabad being situated on the border of Maharashtra, the people do not speak Marathi proper but a mixture of Hindi and Marathi.

At another level, the photograph can be read as a phase in the city of Mumbai – a socio-spatial, political and cultural impact of the gentrification of Lower Parel. Its key defining feature is residential displacement (and a great intensification of socio-spatial inequality) registered in the traces of demolished habitation on the wall.

The photograph is framed in a manner to set the relationship between the objects - An intentional inclusion (exclusion) of the objects of significance and palimpsests and micro-palimpsests within the stratified space.

Footnotes:

1. Hoskins, J. (1998) Biographical objects : how things tell the stories of people's lives P 198

2. Objectification – Christopher Tilley

3. The main old temple of Yedeswari built in honour of Goddess Parvati is 2 kms south of an agricultural village called Yermala and 20 km from Kallamb near Osmanabad, Maharashta. In honour of this goddess fairs are held on Chaitra Suddha Paurnima (April) and Sravan Paurnima (July-Aug) gathering huge crowds. It is said that while Rama was in search of Sita; Parvati, in spite of Shankar’s advice appeared before Rama in the guise of Sita with the intention of pleasing him. But recognizing her, Rama said "Tu ka Ayi (why, you mother?) Parvati did not give up her efforts and appeared a second time when Rama said "tu yedai" and hence the temple established here came to be called as Yedai or Yedesvari.

4. Elephant headed God – popularly held to be the son of Shiva – Parvati. Ganesh is a popular God in Maharashtra.

5. Perhaps Davre Jogis; http://www.shivashakti.com/yograj.htm The other wandering mendicants are Manbhao, Jangam, Basdewa, Satani, Waghya, Gondhali, Jasondhi, Karohla.

6. Agency, Biography and Objects – Janet Hoskins

7. a dialectic of objectification and embodiment

8. ​Baudrillard, J. (1996) The system of objects; P 25

9. The trust was established in the year 1893 and has been in service of devotees ever since. It is the fulcrum of all public Ganesh celebrations in Pune – especially the annual 10 day festival. It was in 1893 when Lokmanya Tilak gave a grand public form to the private family celebration of the festival of Ganpati and made it a genuinely people's festival. He did so "to bridge the gap between the Brahmins and the non-Brahmins and find an appropriate context in which to build a new grassroots unity between them" in his nationalistic strivings against the British in Maharashtra. Pune is the largest city in the state of Maharashtra after Mumbai, and apparently the eighth largest in India. The festival is celebrated in grand scales in both Mumbai and Pune.

10. The redevelopment of Lower Parel has been connected to new influxes of global capital, liberalisation reforms of the Indian economy and of the spatialised production of new middle-class urban identities.

The modern city is a space of movement, flux and flow. Everything changes; sometimes instantly before our eyes, and sometimes almost imperceptibly over time. This year Urban Photographers present Movement, their inaugural exhibition. Association members were invited to respond to the exhibition theme, and there was an expectation that the resulting images would be varied, conceptually diverse, and have a quality of montage rather than a tight, linear flow.

The Association of Urban Photographers is an international group of 30 photographers and artists, all with a shared interest in urban spaces and places. Their work- whether it is about making, publishing or exhibiting photography – asks fundamental questions about the nature of contemporary urban life. The main contribution that the association makes is to open up discussions about how image-makers and urban researchers can rethink ways of engaging with and encountering the city.

Artists:

Anastassios Kavassis                   Beatriz Veliz Argueta

David Jackson                              David Kendall

Diego Ferrari                                 Galit Seligmann

Gesche Wurfel                              Isidro Ramirez

Johannes Rigal                             Katya Demidova

Kyler Zeleny                                  Laura Cuch

Lene Hald                                     Mandy Lee Jandrell

Manuel Vázquez                           Michael Frank

Nora Alissa                                    Orly Zailer

Paul Halliday                                 Peter Coles

Rachel Sarah Jones                      Rebecca Locke

Santiago Escobar-Jaramillo          Sayed Hasan

Simon Rowe                                  Vrinda Seksaria

Yanina Shevchenko                       Yanni Eleftherakos

http://urbanphotographers.org/

http://www.urbanphotofest.org/

MOVIMIENTO

BOGOTA