Practicing Art and Anthropology: A Transdisciplinary Journey 9781474282352, 9781474282383, 9781474282376

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
1. Working with art and anthropology: An introduction
2. Visual and visceral encounters with kolam in South India
3. Art making as third space across India and Sweden
4. Photo-poetic essay
5. Engagements in the ethnographic museum and contemporary art galleries
6. Artistic methods in urban South India
7. ‘Making kolams in London’: A collaborative and participatory art event
8. Sharing practices with British Tamil artists
9. New platforms and future possibilities
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Practicing Art and Anthropology

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY Anthropology and Art Practice, edited by Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright Art, Anthropology and the Gift, Roger Sansi Between Art and Anthropology, edited by Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright

Practicing Art and Anthropology A Transdisciplinary Journey

ANNA LAINE

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Anna Laine, 2018 Marilyn Dunn has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Adriana Brooso Cover image © Anna Laine All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Laine, Anna-Kaisa, author. Title: Practicing art and anthropology : a transdisciplinary journey / Anna Laine. Description: London, UK ; New York, NY, USA : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018001793 | ISBN 9781474282352 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474282376 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Art and anthropology. | Interdisciplinary research. | Kolam (House marks) Classification: LCC N72.A56 L358 2018 | DDC 701/.03--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001793 ISBN: HB: 978–1–4742–8235–2 PB: 978–1–3501–4367–8 ePDF: 978–1–4742–8237–6 eBook: 978–1–4742–8236–9 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Zofia

Contents List of figures  viii Acknowledgements  x

1 Working with art and anthropology: An introduction  1 2 Visual and visceral encounters with kolam in South India  23 3 Art making as third space across India and Sweden  41 4 Photo-­poetic essay  59 5 Engagements in the ethnographic museum and contemporary

art galleries  87 6 Artistic methods in urban South India  95 7 ‘Making kolams in London’: A collaborative and participatory art event  119 8 Sharing practices with British Tamil artists  137 9 New platforms and future possibilities  169 Notes  187 References  199 Index  209

List of figures The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book. 1.1

Father and daughter anoint a newly installed Nandi, Shiva’s vehicle, at a Tamil temple in London. Photograph: Anna Laine, 2011. 10 2.1 Kolam-making, Chennai. Video excerpts: Anna Laine, 2009. 32–33 3.1 Reconstruction of words linked to red circular objects, an interactive artwork by Kristina Matousch, Malathi Selvam and Anna Laine, presented at the exhibition Performative formations, New Delhi, 2009. 41 3.2 Malathi Selvam and Kristina Matoush collaboratively explore red circular objects found in materials shops in the Paharganj area. Photograph: Anna Laine, 2009. 53 3.3 Last preparations in the gallery, Malathi Selvam makes a figurative kolam and Kristina Matousch arranges the words relating to red circular objects. Video excerpt: Anna Laine, 2009. 54 4.1–4.13 Portraits of kolam makers. Photographs: Anna Laine, 2006. 61-85 5.1 Auspiciousness, photographic portraits and citations, by Anna Laine, presented at the exhibition Kolam – ephemeral patterns of eternal prosperity. Photograph: Zofia Laine, 2010. 87 5.2 Bharathi Salai – Slaggatan, stitched kolam, by Anna Laine, presented at the exhibition Kolam – ephemeral patterns of 89 eternal prosperity. Photograph: Anna Laine, 2012. 6.1 Arunadevi’s realization of the photographic theme Future where her daughter performs as doctor, presented at the 95 Chennai workshops, 2009. Courtesy of Arunadevi. 6.2 On the way to Nagammal’s house, Chennai. Video excerpt: 101 Anna Laine, 2009. 6.3 Nagammal in the studio, as auspicious at the time of her first period, and in male attire at the time of her first pregnancy. 106 Courtesy of Nagammal. 6.4 Nagammal in her kitchen. Video excerpt: Anna Laine, 2009. 107 6.5 Geetha’s realization of the photographic theme Self-­portrait where she identifies with her kolu arrangement, presented at the Chennai workshops, 2009. Courtesy of Geetha. 110 7.1 The event Making kolams in London, collaboratively organized by Hari Rajaledchumy, Anna Laine and the Tamil Community Centre in Hounslow. Video excerpt: Anna Laine, 2012. 127

List of figures

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Sabes Sugunasabesan’s contribution to the group exhibition Memorial at Greenwich Gallery, London, 2012. The show was constituted by Crossing Lines, based on a collaboration between London Independent Photography and Centre for Urban & Community Research at Goldsmiths. The photographs are ca 20 x 30 cm. Photograph: Anna Laine, 2012.   140 Aruntha Ratnaraj shows her pastel drawing of two women in intimate friendship across borders based on caste. Hari Rajaledchumy, Reginald A. Aloysius and K. Krishnarajah pay close attention while Sabes Sugunasabesan and Anushiya Sundaralingam sits on the left of my photographing body. Photograph: Anna Laine, 2013. 146 Reginald S. Aloysius mixed media work WY374, which presents Tamil temples embedded in vegetation incised by modern scaffolding and airline routes, 2012. The piece is 90 x 120 cm. Photograph: Anna Laine, 2012. 150 K. Krishnarajah’s drawing of an elder Tamil woman raped by the Sinhala army. The drawing has been disseminated through magazines and used in riots for women’s rights in Sri Lanka and India. The drawing is 30 x 20 cm. Photograph: Anna Laine, 2012. 155 Excerpt from the video Making Home – with five artists based in the UK which connects Hari Rajaledchumy’s canvas cutting with the sense of being placeless and unfamiliar in his diasporic existence. Video excerpt: Anna Laine, 2012. 158 Anushiya Sundaralingam’s model for an installation at the later exhibition Re Root, presented at the Cresent Arts Centre, Belfast, 2014. The model is 120 cm high. Photograph: Anna Laine, 2013. 161 Excerpt from the video Making Home – with five artists based in the UK which concerns the relationship between Aruntha Ratnaraj and her house in Jaffna, connected through the thinnai pillars in her painting of women’s afternoon chats. The painting is 30 x 40 cm. Video excerpt: Anna Laine, 2013. 165 Kolam-making with art students and public participants as part of the event Drawing kolam rhythms as city living, arranged by Anna Laine and Hari Rajaledchumy at Open School East, London. Photograph: Anna Laine, 2015. 180

The inclusion of material over which Anna Laine does not hold the copyright are in a few cases based on agreements made during fieldwork. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders to obtain their additional confirmation to use any previously unpublished material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Acknowledgements I

would like to thank all the beloved participants and collaborators in this book. Special gratitude is owed to those who welcomed me into their lives during fieldwork and who through their hospitality, patience and confidence allowed me to learn and grow. Immense appreciation is given to the people who generously engaged in my writing, particularly Chris Wright, Eva RosénHockersmith, Hari Rajaledchumy, Maria Görts, Thera Mjaaland, Sabes Sugunasabesan and Kuladevy Elangovan. I am much obliged to all friends and colleagues who have supported me in various ways, and mostly to my daughter Zofia.

1 Working with art and anthropology: An introduction

C

ollaborations between artists and anthropologists have increased during the first two decades of the twenty-­first century and continue to evoke considerable debate. Proponents and antagonists in the respective fields discuss a wide range of issues concerning methodology, theorization, representation and presentation. Arguments are constituted around viable epistemological forms and knowledge productions (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2015; Schneider and Wright 2006, 2009, 2013), sensual and material engagements in social relations (Ingold 2013; Svasek 2012; Wright 2013), ontological perspectives on images and objects (Gell 1998; Pinney and Thomas 2001; Latour 2005), theoretical and conceptual developments (Belting 2014; Sansi 2015; Ssorin-Chaikov 2013), and power imbalances between globally dispersed actors (Enwezor et  al. 2012; Marcus and Myers 1995; Schneider 2006a, 2006b, 2012). Varying conventions regarding aesthetics and ethics have prompted the most edgy disputes, and they have postulated incompatibility and institutional purity as well as productive tensions with potentials for increased exchange. This book is a contribution to the ongoing debate. It presents a particular kind of experience based on exploratory engagements within and across art, anthropology and art as research. This way of working has developed during practice-­based learning within photography and fine art, followed by academic training in anthropology and subsequent experiments with joining the two, partly by way of the newly established field artistic research (expanded on p. 11f). Skills in how images, objects, sounds and installations affect us and transform what we know have guided my inquiries, and pointed at theoretical frameworks concerned with conceptualizations of the material, relational and sensory as well as implications of actual situations of making.

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From the perspective of anthropology as a discipline, the anthropologist’s own experiences and feelings are recognized as influencing the knowledge produced during fieldwork and are given a prominent role in many ethnographic texts. Following hermeneutic and deconstructionist approaches, the proclaimed authority of objectively explaining other cultures was challenged by the ‘writing culture’ critique and replaced by an acknowledgement of the researcher’s subjective position (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986). The idea of possessing scientific neutrality and rationalism transformed into self-­reflexive investigations that scrutinized how cultural background and personal experience impacted on the research process. However, this approach has been criticized as a risk where the capacity for analytical reflection and generalized explanations of social realities and the consequential ability to engender substantial and valid knowledge might be lost (Aull Davies 1999; D’Andrade 1995). The reluctance towards the inclusion of personal experiences and intense emotions has partly been articulated in an anxious attitude toward images and their aesthetic capacities, conceptualized as an ‘iconophobia’ that subordinates visual representations in favour of the ethnographic text and binds their multiple meanings by captions (Taylor 1996). As already pointed out by scholars who embrace the incorporation of artistic practices in anthropology, the iconophobic stance remains as a hindrance towards visual experimentations and a dismissal of images’ and objects’ capacities to constitute knowledge and it hereby continues to affect the debates on possible collaborations between artists and anthropologists (Cox, Irving and Wright 2016; MacDougall 1997, 1998; Schneider and Wright 2006, 2010; Wright 1998).1 The simultaneous acknowledgement of the subjective position of the researcher and his or her textual production, and the reductive notion of images as objective evidence and illustrations emerged as a conundrum during my initial encounter with anthropology. What if material and sensual practices of art making had been available to Renato Rosaldo in his account of Ilongot headhunting practices, a classic example of how personal experience has been used as a vehicle for increased understanding (1989)? Ilongot men cut off heads of fellow humans during reoccurring attacks and they explained the killings to Rosaldo as acts of rage born of grief and loss. Their tossing away of the decapitated heads aimed to analogically toss away and eliminate this rage. The force of the pain behind the practice became accessible to Rosaldo only after the accidental death of his wife in the field. His own mourning and consequent reflection affected the fieldwork process and the concluding analysis, and aware of the risk of academic dismissal in using personal experience as an explanatory variable, he decided to include his own bereavement in the written account. However, while Rosaldo grasped Ilongot headhunting in a visceral emotional manner, his experience and understanding

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has only been made accessible to others through academic texts. Could an installation of images and sound have evoked the rage of grief experienced by Rosaldo, and hereby made it possible for the beholder to come closer to the emotional intensity that made him grasp why this force was essential to understanding Ilongot headhunting? What other routes or methods might there have been towards understanding the unspeakable grief of headhunters? In what ways could a close collaboration with the Ilongots on artistic forms improve the manner in which their practice was conveyed? Is there a distinct line to be drawn in terms of which kind of attention, method and presentation that should be termed artistic and anthropological? These questions, largely based on my own experiences with art, have directed my inquiries into how visual and material practices might be combined with the linguistic and textual in the process of developing anthropological knowledge. My position does not regard images and texts as opposites, but rather follows Jean-François Lyotard’s separation between ‘figure’ and ‘discourse’ where the first concept incorporates textual forms like poetry in its reference to sensory experience of plastic art, and the second designates meaning as firmly anchored through philosophical closure (2010). Three academic texts evolved as central motivations for my continued exploration. The first was Beyond the Boundary: A Consideration of the Expressive in Photography and Anthropology by Elizabeth Edwards (1997), who argued for a need to incorporate the expressiveness and subjectivity of photography in anthropological practice. With reference to contemporary photographic critique that has challenged the idea of photographs as visual facts, she focused on an interrelatedness rather than opposition between realist and expressionist perspectives. This was part of what I had learned through practice, and Edwards made me see new possibilities within anthropology. My interest in Hindu imagery lead me towards the second text, Darshan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, by Diana Eck (1985), and her account of Hindu vision as tactile and its revered objects as agents opened up connections between images and language and enhanced my motivation for fieldwork in India. The last text was Contemporary Art and Anthropology by Arnd Schneider and Chris Wright (2006), which brought considerable excitement through its recognition of contemporary art practice as a relevant subject for anthropology. The authors highlight existing overlaps between artists and anthropologists and suggest increased collaboration as productive for both fields. Their emphasis on the potentials of shared practices finally provided a qualified link between my artistic and anthropological ways of working, and their progressive approach spoke to my training in photography and art that promoted experimentation as soon as the basics were apprehended. Although the practice-­based knowledge remained unrecognized by academic superiors due to my incapacity to translate it into verbal form, the direction forward was set. The motivating texts provided

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guidance into a reimagining of how the dynamic social and material world around me could be explored across disciplinary boundaries and pre-­set knowledge fields, and conventional ways of working began to be reshaped. With this book, I aim to shed new light on possible collaboration and transgressions that are relevant to both artists and anthropologists, whether they work inside, outside or in collaboration with academia. I suggest that it is central to establish and enhance the level of trust between practitioners of the respective fields in order to develop future experimentations and possibilities of emergent knowledge. The subsequent chapters give an account and analysis of a journey, where personal experiences and ethnographic descriptions intersect with theoretical explorations that advance along the way. They centre on collaborative and participatory projects conducted within and in relation to ethnographic fieldwork with Tamils; in South India, and in the UK among the diaspora who migrated from Sri Lanka. Each project accounted for in the book concerns processes of making and learning though different materials and social situations, and presentations of resulting works in both artistic and anthropologically informed contexts. The continuation of this introduction outlines epistemological positions and their implication for integrations of the well-­established fields of art and anthropology; recent collaborations and debates between the two fields; and discussion within artistic research, authorized as an academic discipline at the beginning of the current century and yet in the process of defining its precise objectives. The institutionalization of borders is further investigated in relation to transdisciplinarity as a possible frame for future experimentations and expansions of academic practices. This section is followed by the structure of the book, and a note on its black and white photography. The book is compiled through a certain paradox, as the described projects emerged through a need to work beyond the verbal and textual. However, they have successively transformed into combinations of texts and various other media which hereby provide ethnographically grounded examples intended to nuance and expand current debates and practices at the intersection of art and anthropology. As readers, you are invited to encounters of institutional conservatism and progressive scholars, distance and participation, representation and evocation, success and failure, which collectively hold potentials of guidance along your own route of investigation.

Art and anthropology The capacity of the renewed collaboration between art and anthropology has been realized through the Ethnographic Terminalia, established as an experimental artistic environment in parallel with the annual conference of the

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American Anthropological Association since 2009, and the Anthropology and the Arts Network founded as part of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in 2017. Schneider and Wright have edited three volumes vital in this development by their strong advocacy for explorations and experiments that cross both methodological and theoretical lines of inquiry (2006, 2010, 2013). They begin in resonance with the ethnographic turn in contemporary art where artists began to explore fieldwork as method and criticize practices of collection and display in ethnographic museums; evolves around how engagements with art practice connects the already established visual2 and sensual3 fields in anthropology, including phenomenologically informed attention to experiential knowledge4; and ends with a call for intensified exchange motivated by the increase of artistic interventions in social and postcolonial contexts where anthropological assessments of global power relations can enhance ethically conditioned participation.5 Schneider and Wright’s works are structured around potentials of convergences between art and anthropology rather than the dualistic perspective of differences and similarities. The authors criticize existing tendencies to reify practitioners from both fields, and argue that the respective disciplines incorporate a vast variety of intentions and methodologies. But they emphasize that this strategy does not aim to obscure existing disparities and consequently they account for scepticism within mainstream anthropology as well as in art criticism. One of the main separations the authors identify is the finished product in the respective fields. While ways of working and themes of investigation may overlap, anthropology requires a representational conclusive text but artists can present tentative objects and performances as an outcome of a study. Experimentation with these tensions are embraced as a productive method to expand anthropological ways of working and hereby generate new knowledge (Schneider and Wright 2010: 11). Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz have proposed collaborative exchanges between art and anthropology as a way of sharpening anthropological sensibilities and enhancing its visual knowledge production (2005, and Ravetz 2007a, 2007b). In a critical reflection of the debates incited by the recent realignment, the authors challenge the polarization between resistance and wholehearted embrace and call for a more nuanced understanding (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2015). They argue that productive collaborations need to recognize differences, and point at radically distinctive positions concerning knowledge forms within the respective fields. Artistic work is described as improvisational, imaginative, and aimed at disrupting established knowledge, in contrast to a logical anthropology engaged in conventional cumulative processes. Anthropologists produce knowledge according to a model that builds on previous corollaries and is finalized with a concluding argument, but, following the philosopher John Dewey, knowledge generated by artists emerge through

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transformative processes shaped by interactions between the presented artwork and its audience (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2015: 430). Aesthetics and ethics reoccur as tense themes in the debate. Grimshaw and Ravetz identify contradictory positions between artists and anthropologists and define them as critical forms of resistance towards continued collaboration (2015: 427). It is argued that artistic works made by anthropologists often are dismissed by artists for their lack of attention to form and affect, and that socially engaged works made by artists are dismissed by anthropologists on behalf of their neglect to consider power relations at play. Ravetz has a background in art practice and has experienced this contradiction from several perspectives. The risk of misrecognition was elucidated by the art critic Hal Foster at the early stages of the ethnographic turn (1995), which had been enabled by James Clifford’s expanded definition of ethnography and following invitation to various fields of practice and knowledge production (1988). In the seminal article The Artist as Ethnographer?, Foster presents a sceptical perspective based on mutual envy, and he cautions for artists engaged in site-­specific works and community art who appropriate the term ethnography without actually implementing the method, and for self-­idealized anthropologists who pretend to be avant-­garde artists open to chance (1995). Foster suggests that artists objectify the other for their own fame and engage in self-­fashioning in favour of a community’s well-­being. This alert of unjustifiable appropriations of ethnographic methods is continuously reiterated in anthropological discussions on ethical positions among artists and their implications for future collaborations (Cox, Irving and Wright 2016: 8; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2015: 426; Sansi 2015: 7; Schneider 2016: 208; Schneider and Wright 2006: 19). But at the same time as contemporary anthropologists receive rigorous training in ethics and must articulate their treatment of ethical codes before funding can be received, Pentagon has been able to employ career driven scholars who have provided local knowledge for the US pursuits of refining their counterinsurgency programmes (Forte 2011; Sanford and Angel-Ajani 2006). The anthropological resistance to aesthetics has been informed by the Kantian notion of an individual experience in an autonomous field where the subject is detached from the perceived object, and the subsequent establishment of a Western modernist discourse with white male universal claims of aesthetic judgements.The term has been dismissed by anthropologists through its lack of engagement with the social (Gell 1998: 3) and by its intertwinement with a particular historical and cultural context (Overing 1996: 260). Aesthetics has been re-­conceptualized within anthropology as well as art in relation to contemporary practice, however, the two disciplines have not always been aware of the historical developments in the other (Marcus and Myers 1995: 6). In the former field, Chris Pinney introduced the term

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‘corpothetics’ to account for the sensorial and relational engagements with imagery in popular Hinduism (2001: 8, 2003, 2004), where he draws on Susan Buck-Morss’s reclaim of the Greek term aisthitikos (1992), and David MacDougall has defined culturally constructed orders of sensory experience and response in daily interactions as ‘social aesthetics’ (2006). Social interventions among contemporary artists directed towards the realization of interpersonal relations through participatory and collaborative practices with the public has affected art criticism, particularly through Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept ‘relational aesthetics’ (2002) and Grant Kester’s ‘conversational aesthetics’ (2004). Kester has, in spite of Foster’s caution of the dominance of the artist’s self-­interest, shown how collaborations with communities and neighbourhoods evolve into political practices and art making which enhance social situations in marginalized areas (2004, 2011). In response to the altruistic aspects of participatory and collaborative art, Claire Bishop argues for a more antagonistic approach that reclaims the critical and qualitative potential of an autonomous artist separated from aims of doing social good where aesthetic judgement is automatically replaced by ethical concerns and sociological discourse (2004, 2012). Her caution further concerns the risk of producing artists that take on an instrumentalized role of correcting social ills and maintaining infrastructures neglected by an irresponsible political governance, particularly as such governance participates in funding community art projects and evaluates them in relation to their social effect (Jackson 2011; Kester 2011: 198). Bishop’s polarizing view affected a split between artists who either aligned with her notion of the artist as autonomous and engaged with aesthetics and those who aspired towards intersubjective encounters which could improve social relations and rights and therefore paid larger attention to ethics. However, the philosopher Jacques Rancière argues that aesthetics not only is a part of everyday life but also at the core of politics (2004, 2011), and Bishop contends that he has opened up new ways of discussing and analysing participatory art (2012: 18). These variations elucidate the heterogeneity within art practices and offer a counter position to the tendency in mainstream anthropology of reifying art into a singularity based on the modernist tradition of presenting objects to be interpreted from a distance. The increased permeability between social work, activism and other forms of cultural practices in contemporary art points towards the potential for art practice in social research. The affirmative approach towards collaboration between artists and anthropologists is further advanced by Roger Sansi (2015), and he focuses on conceptual issues rather than the practices of sharing physical materials and perceptual sensibilities emphasized by Schneider and Wright.6 Sansi is specifically interested in socially engaged art and its activist intention for political change, and, based on fieldwork among contemporary Spanish artists,

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he addresses how the notion of the free gift is used to evoke commonality and a higher level of equality in marginalized communities. It has been argued that artists within this field run the risk of reproducing the inequalities they intended to challenge by not recognizing and addressing existing inequalities (Bishop 2004; Kester 2011; Kwon 2002), and Sansi suggests that they might benefit from anthropological theories of the gift (Sansi 2015: Ch 5). Following Marcel Mauss, the gift produces and reproduces social hierarchies; it is bound to obligations of giving, receiving and returning, founded in notions of divisible persons which assures that parts of the giver always is distributed by the gift (1990 [1925]). Sansi suggests that increased awareness of the implications of social obligations in situations of giving could further the artists’ objectives of changing local power relations. At the same time, he argues that anthropologists can learn from artists in how the conditions for collaboration are arranged. Conventional anthropological ethics requires the researcher to ask for the informant’s consent to participation, and however essential this practice has been, it can reproduce a hierarchy where the researcher is positioned above the informant as a professional agent in relation to an amateur. The offering of a comprehensive form of representation becomes a manifestation of difference able to hinder collaboration on equal terms. The notion of equality and absence of contracts in art practice might facilitate a variety of relations to emerge in the process (Sansi 2015: 151–52). The necessity to address power relations in social art practice and its context of the global art world and economic differentiations at large has further been pointed out by Schneider and Wright (2013). They advocate more diversified discussions of what participation and collaboration stands for in artworks that engage audiences and inhabitants of local neighbourhoods. They propose a separation of the level of involvement where participation addresses situations of taking part, and collaboration is used in relation to actual co-­labour (2013: 11). Both art and anthropology have been actively engaged in politics of representation and critique of their respective institutions since the 1960s; artists have challenged the idea of their work as autonomously framed within the Western elite and anthropologists have scrutinized their proclaimed science-­based and white male authority and interactions with colonial powers. At the renewed encounter between the two fields, Sansi moves beyond the shared interest in other cultures and identifies converging criticisms of contemporary realities and suggestions of alternative perspectives, and aims to challenge classical Western definitions and the current dominance of capitalism and loss of community. He suggests that anthropology should engage more with artistic practices as methods of investigating social and political relations, and of understanding how social life can be presented as performative processes rather than representations of a reality already given. The artists’ disavowal of their own agency in favour of other participants in

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collaborative emancipatory practices enables space for chance and the unpredictable, which in turn can be useful for anthropological ways of working (Sansi 2015). The conceptualization of social lives as ongoing processes is a main concern within Tim Ingold’s approach towards the relationship between art and anthropology. He focuses on ways of making, embedded in a phenomenologically and ecologically informed perspective on how relations between beings and their environment evolve through various skills (2000, 2011, 2013). Ingold elucidates that the knowledge we gain from experience is guided by perception, which in turn has been shaped by what the ecological psychologist James Gibson calls the ‘education of attention’ (1979: 254; cf Ingold 2000: 22, 2013: 2). Novices are instructed about how and what is important to pay attention to, and their skills gradually become fine-­tuned in relation to a particular context. In this vein, meanings can successively be discovered, and the world is made knowledgeable. We participate in a similar formation during fieldwork, when our mentors teach us how to see, hear and feel as they do. Ingold exemplifies this process by how his own thinking and philosophical preferences were formed by Saami ways of paying attention during fieldwork in his early career (2013). The education of my own attention has likewise impacted on the research projects addressed in this book. Issues of investigation, methodologies, theorizations and presentations have taken shape not only by anthropological sites of fieldwork and academia but in relation to two decades of training and professional work within art practice, photo journalism and the advertizing industry. Shifting attention in relation to various contexts has required readjustments of several kinds, and certain alterations have been subtle and slow, while others can be considered conflictual. It is the long-­term engagement with creating images and objects that have directed my way of working to the intersection of art and anthropology and a particular interest in the implication of processes of making. The concern with ethics and politics of representations emerged through encounters with migrants and refugees who were frustrated with photographic simplifications of their struggles, long before I entered any academic curriculum. However, the anthropological training has improved my knowledge of how artistic as well as academic interventions interact with global power relations and in turn this generated a specific interest in socially engaged art with transformational and emancipatory aims. Movement and temporal orientation are central to Ingold’s assessment of the relation between art and anthropology (2011, 2013). He focuses on continuous practical engagements with materials, the process of making art rather than analysing indexical aspects of completed works. Anthropology of art and art history, along with visual and material culture studies7, are considered as retrospective movements that begin with the object and

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therefore miss out on the sensory awareness of the maker and the transformational dynamics embedded in making. The artist on the other hand moves forward in correspondence with the materials of the world, where attentive perception is sharpened in relation to responses from beings and things. Ingold complicates the intersection at art and anthropology by placing ethnography and anthropology in different categories of his temporal orientations. The artist and the anthropologist move forwards as participant observation (as fieldwork method) entails the same processes of engagements from the inside as art making, but ethnography (as written) is positioned in the retrospective movement through its focus on accurate descriptions from the outside of that which already has taken place. In this scheme, art and anthropology are compatible through their continuous experimental work that has a capacity to transform while ethnography is differentiated as concerned with the completion of documents. Artists and anthropologists come to know through a forward oriented ‘art of inquiry’ that emphasizes thinking through making (2013: 6). Ingold promotes their interaction and argues that the core

FIGURE 1.1

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potential lies in exchanges based in practice. This includes ways of teaching and the development of pedagogical methods that employ the transformational effect of making things rather than looking at them in retrospect (2007, 2011, 2013). Possible common ground of subject matter and theoretical developments are thus set aside in favour of sharpening people’s attention in order to learn from the inside in intimate correspondences with beings and things. Ingold opens up for artworks as possible results of fieldwork in addition to texts (2013: 8). The term ‘result’ implies that the artwork is complete, and then it would perhaps enter into an ethnography and a phase that can only be assessed through retrospective engagement. It would have stopped to move in relation to the world. This prompts the question of when an artwork is complete. Is it when the gallery doors open or when a curtain falls, when the last stroke of paint is added to a painting or when an art critic has published a verdict? In participatory practices, the work cannot be considered complete without an acting audience. An end point can be particularly ambiguous in relation to performances and action-­based art where an event might be transformed into a video document continuously shown and reconfigured in relation to new curatorial settings. Beholding an artwork may further complicate Ingold’s notion of separating the working process as a forward movement, and the completed work as a retrospective task. Standing in the midst of material objects and installations it is possible to sense traces of the artist’s working process which in turn enables an imagination of different ways of working and experimenting in one’s own practice. For a person who does not engage in making, the cues to how a skill can be improved or shifted might not necessarily be available in this way. But among artists, I argue that embedded associations towards continued learning from the inside the material in alignment with analytical processes of evaluating new transformations are possible. The epistemic potential of artworks is further addressed in the next section where artistic research is presented as a new field that aims to connect art practice with academic theorization.

Artistic research While collaboration between artists and anthropologists has been established as a way of merging art and academia, certain forms of art practice have simultaneously been academized as artistic research. This field of knowledge creation has proliferated vastly since the early 2000s, and shares the uneasy relationship with conventional research procedures as practitioners at the intersection of art and anthropology who are suspected of intellectual incapacities that opens up a conceptual black hole (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2005). Artistic research is a contested space that continuously strives for

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definitions of its boundary and vigorously debates criticisms of its legitimacy (Borgdorff 2012, Biggs and Karlsson 2011; Edling 2009). Academia is anxious about an invasion of unsubstantial ideas and strategies that cannot withstand systematic examination, and the art world worry over the loss of a presumed autonomy and a disciplining effect that might curtail artists’ creative capacity. Henk Borgdorff, president of the international Society for Artistic Research, notes that these arguments are based on a caricature of artistic research which obscures the actual heterogeneity within the field (2012:6). He points at a variety of emerging practices that hold potentials to pose new questions about what art practice and academic research is, and what artistic research might reconfigure them into. In the introduction to the Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, Helga Nowotny notes that the institutionalization of artistic research is related to the increasing emphasis on knowledge as an economic resource and the development of the creative industries where the market incorporates trained artists (2011). Artists have enhanced their investigations of the epistemic potentials of their practices, and the opportunities to obtain a doctoral degree in philosophy based on artistic research is on the rise. The European integration of higher education systems through the Bologna process requires thorough articulations of criteria for evaluation and quality assessment standards which poses challenges towards the less regulated forms of education in the arts. The validity of these requirements continues to cause debate, due to the argument that their formalities pose threats to the curiosity and imagination of artists. Unlike anthropology, artistic research has no canon of exemplary projects and literature to fall back on in these debates. Arguments and definitions often emerge as context dependent according to specific nations or institutions and has yet to be composed into historical accounts. The interdependence between theory and practice is of vital concern to artistic research. But although the field recognises the presence of this mutuality in hermeneutics and constructivism, it claims that a dialogue with Western philosophy and the Science and Technology Studies (STS) is of larger concern than for example anthropology and cultural studies (Borgdorff 2012; Nowotny 2011). It is of particular interest for this book, and anthropology in general, that one of the main experts referred to in STS is Bruno Latour. His ethnographic fieldwork among laboratory scientists has demonstrated that the values and practices which shape science and technology research are socially constructed (Latour 1987; Latour and Woolgar 1986). The notions of instability and uncertainty at the centre of Western-­based scientific research brought forth by Latour has provided legitimacy for artistic researchers’ aims to challenge conventional criteria and infrastructures in academia. Latour’s later questioning of the subject–­object divide (2005, 2013)8 is intertwined with the interest in new materialisms among researchers in the arts, for example shown in the

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engagement of Graham Harman as keynote speaker at the international symposium on artistic research at Gothenburg University in May 2015. The engagement in science and technology has informed the vocabulary and propositions of how artworks can constitute methods and outcomes of artistic research. The term artistic research is favoured over art-­based research and practice-­based research partly through its analogy with scientific research (Nowotny 2011: xxi). In his assessment of the epistemological status of the artwork and its relevance as a research tool, Borgdorff makes a comparison with experimental systems in scientific laboratories. As entities in molecular biology become epistemic things in their function as transformational vehicles through which knowledge can grow, so do artworks hold a capacity to generate new questions and insights (Borgdorff 2012: 193–95). Borgdorff locates the epistemic potential of artworks, be they objects, events or situations, in their vagueness. As such, and in opposition to the emphasis on direct recordings of reality as constitutive of knowledge in mainstream anthropology which continuously effects the aforementioned debate and stifles attempts to experiment with art practice, their openness provides a tool for researching into the not yet known. When the outcome of artistic research is presented as an artwork, it embodies tentative facts that offer possibilities for further questions and understandings. At the same time as status is claimed through the above similarities with uncertainties in scientific practices, many researchers in the arts downplay the idea of the artist as acting on intuition and improvisation. Instead, they emphasize that art-making includes processes of conceptual thinking and hereby is constitutive of knowledge (Ambrozic and Vettese 2013). Both domains are underpinned by the integration of theory and practice and the validity of experiential knowledge in research practices. Like the collaboration between art and anthropology, artistic research aims to challenge and expand possible intersections between art and academia. Practitioners within both fields negotiate sceptical criticism but persist in their claims for legitimate status. The domain of artistic research provided an additional platform to explore in my search for spaces that recognize potentials of work across art and anthropology, and it framed my following project on Tamil diasporic existence. This new field provided insights into similarities in relation to the aims of collaborators between art and anthropology, but also striking differences. While anthropology has looked beyond the Western region for alternative cultural systems and forms of knowledge, the field of artistic research has remained within it. Anthropology has further scrutinized its own knowledge production through feminism and postcolonial critique, but I have found less trace of this in artistic research. Researchers in the arts in fact idealize the Renaissance for its evaluation of art practice as integrated with science and see potentials for future re-­collaborations (Nowotny 2011: xxvi). There is no critical examination of who the Renaissance artists-­scientists

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were and whose voices they silenced in their contemporary societies. At the same time, it is claimed that contemporary art practice has moved out from its previous elite context and engages with social life and new media platforms that reach diverse audiences. From an anthropological perspective, the establishment of a new field of research where the epistemology is based on a construction of Western history devoid of cultural critique evokes ethical concerns. By positioning white male European values at the core of knowledge production, it risks reproducing colonial power relations and the exclusiveness it asserts to have left behind. The related field of art criticism, founded in art history and its main focus on artworks as objects of analysis, has collaborated with anthropology in studies of the global art world, and Thomas Fillitz argues that ethnographic fieldwork of local art forms is necessary to counter the Euro-American dominance at worldwide biennales (2013). This further motivates for Sansi’s suggestion above on beneficial outcomes of increased exchange of respective theories of the gift. My research on everyday lives and artistic practices in the Tamil diaspora, developed in the later part of this book, continues in this direction and aims to bring artistic research into dialogue with the interdependence between art practice and power relations on local, global and transnational scales (Laine 2015a, 2015b, 2016). In relation to the arguments outlined above, I suggest that the mainstream anthropological dismissal of the multiple meanings of images and sounds as devoid of epistemological capacities, and the anxiety of losing freedom when engaging in academic-­based theoretical knowledge among artists, function as barriers to shared aims of a critical approach to social and material relationships.

Borders and transgressions As well as the disciplinary boundaries between art and anthropology, this book is concerned with borders in a wider sense. It aims to elucidate how we attempt to position ourselves and act in relation to experiences of enforced, chosen, real and imagined limits. We live in a world where border control has increased dramatically. Since 11 September 2001, the constructions of physical walls and complex legal regulations of migration and flight have been on the rise. The current president of the US advocates a discriminatory agenda with certain white supremacist leanings that has campaigned for the erection of a wall towards Mexico to prevent migration from South America,9 and Europe has developed a border industry where an ‘anti-­mobility machine’ mercilessly excludes migrants and refugees who travel from Africa (Andersson 2014). The Tamils I worked with in the UK have had to acquire the rules of the European frontier, and many are still struggling with application forms and the Home Office’s eventual decision to grant them permanent residency. They

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continuously interact with both imposed and chosen boundaries in relation to the wider British society but also within the Tamil communities. As for many other diaspora groups, their uncertain notions of belonging effect how everyday lives are lived and ended. Skype conversations replace physical encounters in continued attempts to maintain transnational family ties across the globe, and transcultural identities are formed or resisted in relation to experiences of existing boundaries. Borders manifest as performative acts that construct walls or constitute sociality, and they evolve as imagined or abstract ideas. Tamil women remake a separation between the inner home and the outer public by drawing geometrical white-­lined patterns in front of the entrance, which simultaneously act as invitations to deities and community members. This practice, kolam, constitutes well-­being and auspiciousness, and it is performed daily in the Indian state Tamil Nadu. Kolam and kolam makers have been a main focus in my research and they are continuously re-­ engaged throughout the book. According to Gísli Palsson, ‘Humans are endlessly engaged in some kind of boundary work, in all places at all times; indeed, the theme of the persistence of boundaries and their uses and abuses has a long and lively career in anthropology’ (Palsson 2015: 230). Together with Ingold, he challenges the border between natural and social sciences/the humanities, and its realization within anthropology as physical and social subdisciplines, and proposes that their respective conceptualization of the human as organism and person should be merged into one. Both ontological layers have proven to be mutually constitutive in relation to the environment, and the authors therefore suggest that humans are better understood as biosocial becomings who grow through constant processes of making (Ingold and Palsson 2015). Artists approach similarly radical issues through BioArt, and the implications of their border crossing for collaborations with anthropology will be discussed in the last chapter. Artists and anthropologists who address social and political issues are to various degrees engaged in the global condition of border control. They aim to elucidate and challenge power regimes and the marginalization of certain groups that retain or exclude people on different sides of borders. If collaboration at disciplinary intersections has a chance to substantiate new knowledge and improve activism, I argue that this ought to be encouraged. In order to enable an increased alignment of art, anthropology and artistic research, I suggest a transgressive way of working that positions the issue of investigation above disciplinary belonging. This problem-­centred strategy follows what Patricia Leavy defines as the main concern in the expanding field of transdisciplinary research (2011). She outlines how recent decades have seen a number of attempts to connect academic disciplines, termed as multi-, inter-, trans- and even anti- in order to challenge and/or complement standard forms of inquiries. These attempts have been placed on a continuum based on degrees of

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integration between the disciplines involved in a project, where multirepresents an approach where autonomy is upheld, followed by inter- that allows for mutual enrichment in the process, concluded by transdiciplinarity which focuses on a high level of exchange between methodological and theoretical frameworks as well as of forms of dissemination (Leavy 2011). The continuum is fluid, but transdisciplinarity has developed from a discontent with interdisciplinarity in terms of the latter’s reconfirmation of the disciplinary organization of knowledge instead of moving beyond its boundaries to create synergies and new ways of working and thinking. The transdisciplinary approach has been likened to Homi Bhabha’s idea of ‘third space’ (1994); they share the aim to address complex global issues and define encounters of difference (disciplinary and cultural respectively) as instances where new hybrid productive forms can emerge (Leavy 2011: 45f). A foundational moral concern links transdisciplinarity to social justice and obligations to use all available means to investigate pressing needs in the contemporary world (Leavy 2011: 51). Anthropology is a discipline that continuously scrutinizes its epistemological claims and addresses complex global issues, and postcolonial scholars like Bhabha have frequently been used in critiques of imperial structures and conceptualizations of difference in transnational and transcultural settings. But the notion of trans- has been less applied in relation to anthropological practice. Close collaboration with artists that transcend established disciplinary borders is considered as a hindrance in conventional systems of research assessments and subsequent opportunities of funding and employment (Schneider and Wright 2010). Grimshaw and Ravetz suggest that in addition to protecting its boundaries, anthropology’s rejection of open artistic presentations of fieldwork which explore sensory aesthetic experience in favour of explanatory elements is concerned with the notion that it is ‘often easier to elide than to engage’ (2015: 427). Many anthropological institutions today acknowledge photographs, films and exhibitions as companions to textual representations of fieldwork, but their degrees of experimentation are confined in order to maintain the disciplinary border towards art. As Sansi points out, the inclusive attitude functions on the level of appearance and makes an institution seem creative and innovative, while the strong limitation of inventive form actually reinforces the disciplinary structure (2015: 154). The following chapters aim to continue the trajectory of embracing collaboration and develop trust between practitioners in art and anthropology and the closely related field artistic research. The main gesture of the book is an invitation to engage in unknown ways of working and to further the establishment of networks where disciplinary anxiety and border control lose their weight. By stepping into the unfamiliar, artists can appropriate decisive concepts and anthropologists can experiment with ambiguous audiovisual and material forms and collaboratively generate a supportive

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atmosphere with a potential for the unanticipated to emerge and transform into new knowledge of our complex and unjust world. The book does not suggest a step backwards from where to unlearn, but a daring move forwards into unimagined cracks and notions of trans- in order to expand conceptual frameworks and allow new forms of dissemination to emerge.

The outline of the book Chapter 2 describes my first ethnographic fieldwork and how it developed into an attempt to combine artistic and anthropological practices. The fieldwork was conducted in Tamil Nadu in 2005–6, and carried out with equal time periods in rural and urban areas, and among people of various caste and class memberships. It focused on the ubiquitous kolam practice, where women daily draw geometrical images outside the entrance to their homes to increase the well-­being in the family and the surrounding community, and at the same time create themselves as feminine beings. My interest for this particular practice developed during literature studies of how the presence of deities in Hindu imagery come into being, and the realization of the absence of women in all stages. Visual methods were not part of the curriculum at the anthropology department where I was enrolled, but as the camera had been my main means of making relationships with the world it became indispensable during my participant observation. My camera work, but also my engagement in drawing kolam, became essential to my understanding of the practice. This directed me towards experience, embodiment and making as useful theoretical tools and how they could be connected to Hindu ways of seeing. The chapter will account for the position of kolam in everyday life, the development of my analytical approach, and the inclusion of photographic essays between the chapters in the initial presentation of the kolam research in an expanded version of the doctoral thesis format. The involvement in photographic practices and kolammaking will also initiate the book’s attention to collaboration and participation and the forms of involvement implicated by the respective terms. Chapter 3 focuses on an exhibition project performed as a parallel to the academic-­based kolam work. Together with one Tamil and one Swedish artist, I explored anthropological definitions of third space as a concern for kolam and contemporary art practice. Despite several mishaps, we landed a joint exhibition in an art gallery in New Delhi in 2009. The project was initiated by the Tamil artist who was one of my research subjects and needed help to organize an exhibition where she could present her personal style of kolammaking. Simultaneously in Sweden, I began to stitch my own interpretations of kolam. This work was a thinking through making process which furthered my understanding of the practice, particularly its role in engendering femininity.

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Inquiries towards a Swedish artist working on geometrical patterns led to further collaborations with the Tamil artist, and our subsequent exhibition. The process continues the book’s discussion on collaboration and participation, and how sincere intentions to engage in such practices do not always succeed. Chapter 4 is a photo-­poetic essay. It presents a development of the structure of the kolam thesis in which photographic essays organized around particular themes were incorporated between the written chapters. All words were excluded in order to invite the reader into a more active and multisensorial engagement with the visual material to evoke a sense of experiential presence. The current essay is a development of the same aim but expanded with verbal citations of the portrayed which links the chapter to Lyotard’s notion of ‘figure’ and hereby avoids the opposition between image and text. Chapter  5 contextualizes the photo-­poetic essay and describes how its initial form was presented as an artwork. Named Auspiciousness, it became part of a solo exhibition shown at the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, the Blue Place cultural centre in Gothenburg and the Brunei Gallery in London, during 2010–12. The chapter shows how the New Delhi project influenced my anthropological work bringing it closer to my own art practice and exploring connections between the two fields through sensuous anthropology and material culture as well as continued stitching and video making. The exhibition was motivated by an increased aim to convey research to the public and thus expanded by a didactic part while maintaining the complexity and transformational capacity of audiovisual expressions. The chapter outlines how the sites of display were chosen to challenge and resonate with expectations of their particular audiences, and the exhibited kolam works are framed as examples of Schneider’s notion of appropriation as dialogical practice. Chapter 6 concerns a novel attempt to explore how artistic research methods can expand ethnographic fieldwork and further develop collaboration and exchange between the fields. The project took place during eight intense weeks in Chennai, the main city of Tamil Nadu, during the autumn of 2009. Playful and intimate workshops including photographic making and investigations of material objects provided a wide-­ranging source of knowledge on women’s everyday life in the city. The workshops were arranged around themes and realized within small groups from various communities, and are discussed through visual and material culture as well as notions of collaboration and participation. Our planned public presentation could not be realized as owners of the local art galleries questioned the aesthetic capacity of the low caste women who participated in the workshops. Although this rendered the project partly incomplete, the chapter demonstrates how methods beyond the discursive can expand our knowledge on social and material relationships, and have a capacity to transform participants as well as audiences.

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Chapter  7 is the first chapter that builds on my research with the Tamil diaspora in the UK. The participants had a background in Sri Lanka which brought forth complex issues of migration and flight from a long civil war. This project, conducted between 2012 and 2014, was formally positioned within the discipline artistic research but no less based on anthropology than my earlier investigations. The chapter describes an art action I organised in collaboration with a Tamil refugee centre and a Tamil artist in the suburban shopping centre of Hounslow in southwest London. The action focused on kolam, here withdrawn from public space due to perceived hostility toward Tamil visibility and presence. The refugee centre initially wanted to replicate a South Asian kolam competition, but the event developed into an activist intervention that momentarily expanded the space of a marginalized group. The action was methodologically employed as a form of participant observation where I explored people’s relationship to artistic practice and to being Tamil in the British environment. At the same time, it incorporated elements of socially and politically engaged relational art. The analysis probes further into the concepts of collaboration and participation and how they can be used to evaluate degrees of agency distributed to people who take part in this art form. Engagements with the Tamil diaspora emerged into a focus on contemporary artists, and Chapter 8 accounts for how this research evolved. Collaboration is taken to a further level through joint video-making with five of the artists during eighteen months’ fieldwork in London, Belfast and Jaffna. This process has been a method to learn about how the artists use their visual and material art practices to investigate their complex belonging and constant emotional movements between a geographical here and there. I investigated their process of investigating themselves, and the similarities in our interest and ways of working blurred the boundaries between researcher and researched, at the same time as it brought forth differences between the artists. The collaboration eventually forced me to look at my own Finnish migratory background and the work came to embody a time–­space dialogue between the consequences of the recent war in Sri Lanka and those of the Second World War in Europe when refugees from just across the Baltic Sea were perceived as other. Finally Chapter 9 draws together the projects presented in the book and demonstrates how their underpinning in art, anthropology and artistic research provides useful tools in producing knowledge on the relations between beings and things situated in particular contexts. The projects are re-­examined by their degree of collaboration and participation and the concept of conditional art is introduced to frame their respective arrangements and attentions to aesthetics and ethics. There is an increasing range of platforms available for materials that traverse artistic and anthropological practices and

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a few will be addressed in relation to the presented works where the video made in collaboration with the Tamil artists constitutes the main example. The chapter highlights how artistic and academic forms can be combined in order to convey different aspects of research results and evoke various kinds of alterations through which knowledge can grow. The transformational capacity of making things and relations through materials are further related to pedagogical strategies where the kolam practice has been used in teaching and learning. Notions of borders and belongings are re-­engaged in relation to selves, communities, geographies and disciplines, where anthropological and philosophical discourses are connected with fieldwork encounters. Motivated by the complex and dynamic character of global processes and the potential of employing multiple tools rather than emphasizing singular frameworks, I encourage experimental strategies at the intersection of art and anthropology which currently might benefit from a transdisciplinary approach that puts the research question first.

A note on names Ethical concerns in anthropological ways of working have established the convention of using pseudonyms rather than real names to protect research subjects when they are referred in ethnographic texts. Partly in relation to Sansi’s aforementioned argument that this approach can reproduce a hierarchy between the professional researcher who offers and the local amateur who merely responds, my own strategies have changed during the course of realizing the projects described in this book. The initial kolam research has followed the conventional model and the names used in reference to the first fieldwork in Tamil Nadu are pseudonyms. The second period of fieldwork in Chennai, accounted for in Chapter  6, has deviated from this praxis. The participants’ real names are used except in three cases, when they specifically asked to be kept anonymous for personal reasons. The aim has been to enlarge the space of the research subjects where they are acknowledged as individual collaborators and contributors in the process of generating new knowledge. In addition, my expansion of visual methods and presentations has in effect rendered anonymity impossible and thus called for an approach where consent of participation includes dimensions of being seen in relation to my critical investigations. The collaboration with the contemporary artists described in Chapter 8 was partly an outcome of their individual agreements to be named; they were few and impossible to anonymize within the Tamil communities. The process developed as a form of co-­research and anonymity transformed into an awkwardness. In order to not put the participants at risk, certain views on political aspects of Tamil belonging has had to be excluded.10

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Not all persons are referred to with two names. Surnames in the South Asian context have a history of being linked to caste membership, and during the non-Brahmin movement in Tamil Nadu it became common to drop these markers. Many Tamils have one name only, or add a first initial that usually refers to father, husband or place of birth, and which might be used in full in formal contexts. Some Tamils have a practice of using both a first name and a surname, and in the diaspora new forms of shortenings develop in relation to majority practices.

A note on black and white The photographs presented in this book are black and white. All of them were originally made in colour, and the shift has affected which images I have chosen to include. The importance of yellow and red in relation to the kolam practice and its construction of femininity can for example not be conveyed visually without colour and has been replaced by aspects of making. Black and white is often associated with historical time or timelessness, which stands in opposition to the aim of presenting everyday life experienced during fieldwork as ongoing. However, the years that have passed since my first fieldwork in Tamil Nadu have partly transposed the relationships the photographs concern into the domain of memories and hereby their black and white association with history has a certain relevance. But the later works appear slightly contradictive in this form. In order to avert misapprehension, it is possible for interested readers to access several of the photographs and video works in colour online. The following sites contain the videos http://www.jar-­online.net/index.php/ issues/view/490 and http://vimeo.com/4290542. The photographic essays included in the doctoral thesis can be accessed at https://gupea.ub.gu.se/ handle/2077/19290. On a personal note, the black and white associates with my initial engagements in photography during the early 1980s when the practice was increasingly recognized as an art form. Black and white presented a certain genre considered to hold a dynamic tension between intimacy and uncompromizing roughness where colour was a disruptive element connected to glamour and artificiality. During this mainly analogue era black and white processes were less complex and expensive and they also became a part of my home. Consequently, the lack of colour fits into a familiar and durational process of my way of working.

2 Visual and visceral encounters with kolam in South India Introduction The chilly village streets lay embedded in dark silence. In the vague light of a distant lamppost, Diviya prepares the ground outside her house for the drawing of the morning kolam. Although she has just splashed cold water on her face and brushed her teeth, the darkness makes awakening slow. Diviya walks across the street and collects fresh cow dung at the back of the house where her neighbour keeps a few cattle. The dung is mixed with water in a large aluminium bowl. With one hand Diviya holds the bowl steady against her hip. With the other, she sprinkles the liquid over the ground from the front wall of the house up to the middle of the street. The liquid is left to sink in for a while, until the dust becomes one with the ground. After sweeping this damp area thoroughly, Diviya brings a half coconut shell filled with white powder which she keeps at hand just inside the door. With this powder, she will draw an image on the street, the kolam. Facing the entrance of the house, she bends her back and takes a handful of powder. This is made to trickle down between her thumb and index finger into a precise grid of dots. With graceful rhythmical hand movements, she draws a thin line which twists and turns around the dots. When the dots are joined properly, the end of the line meets its beginning. The symmetrical image shines brightly on the damp soil in front of the entrance. By drawing vertical lines and a couple of small geometrical forms on the step and threshold, Diviya completes the act. As she stretches her back, she exchanges a few words with the neighbouring women who are still working on their kolams. They are in a hurry to finish before the other daily responsibilities have to be attended. Diviya has to make breakfast before cycling off to school, and today she has an important exam. She longs for the coming temple festival when time is given to create large, elaborate kolams in which she can experiment with new ideas and combine the white powder with colours. Still, she is confident that the Hindu goddess

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Mariamman will accept today’s small kolam as an offering and invitation. Diviya believes that at the break of dawn, Mariamman will walk the village streets. Satisfied with the invitation, she enters the house and gives blessings which in turn increase the prosperity and well-­being of the family. Tomorrow, Diviya will practise with powder made of rice. It requires more dexterity but has improved effect as it turns the kolam into a food offering for insects and birds.1 The majority of women in Tamil Nadu, South India, draw a kolam outside their house in a similar way to Diviya. Kolam creates an auspicious atmosphere and the practice is part of women’s daily chores for the well-­being of their family members and surrounding community. I encountered the kolam practice through an ambiguous position between an anthropological training which had disciplined me into a focus on language as the main source of knowledge and experiences as a photographer and artist where I had created relationships with and learned about the world through making and viewing images. Coming from a field of photography and art practice where the constructedness of images were common sense, I was perplexed by the general focus on photographs as evidence which stood in stark contrast to anthropology’s self-­reflexive approach to writing. The inclusion of pictures as illustrations was a further conundrum but it yet coincided with my preconception of academia as the stronghold for detached texts. Departmental requirements made me put parts of my previous experiences of image-making on hold. At my arrival in Tamil Nadu, however, my new attention to texts and the disciplinary boundaries between art and anthropology lost their relevance. I immersed myself in kolam and its emplacement in Tamil Hindu ways of being, and unforeseen theoretical possibilities developed in the process. This chapter outlines how knowledge about kolam emerged within initial literature studies of Hindu conceptions of society and cosmos and developed through one-­year fieldwork in rural and urban settings of Tamil Nadu in 2005–6. It illuminates how the conventional methodological focus on verbal articulations expanded into visual and visceral ways of working and hereby produced knowledge constituted by dialogue as well as sensuous experience. It will be shown that it takes both forms to sufficiently understand kolam. The chapter further outlines how photographic material was used with artistic ambitions beyond the expected form of illustrations to invite the reader/viewer into their own embodied encounters with kolam.

Hindu vision and porosity Kolam is made and seen in a context where vision has decisive tactile dimensions. In Hindu philosophy and everyday life, seeing and being seen

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entail close interaction and are constitutive of human and divine relations. It has benign effects through the notion of darshan, but can be malign in the form of drishti. Darshan refers to vision as forms of knowing and as a sense of touching enabled by exchanges of glances between people and revered beings. When a devotee beholds an image or object that embodies a deity, the two engage in intimate visual contact and enter a position of merging which is crucial to Hindu worship. This understanding of the actual embodiment and presence of the God or Goddess as has developed within the bhakti movement, which emphasizes an affectionate relationship between deity and devotee accessible without the mediation of a Brahmin priest (Fuller 1992). Darshan further holds the potential of the devotee’s seeing, and hereby grasping, the revered being’s knowledge perspective on truth in situations of meditation. The term became an important category in studies of Hinduism and visual culture in India through the historian of religion Diana Eck (1981) and the anthropologist Lawrence Babb (1981).2 They demonstrate that religious practices are intertwined with the social, and darshan can be received as blessings from deities, sacred landscapes and holy sadhu men as well as from politicians and film stars. God exists in all of nature and is at the same time present in all human beings (conceptualized as brahman and atman) and is why a particularly revered person can be approached as a deity. Tamils use the term darisanam but people rarely referred to this benevolent sensorial exchange during my fieldwork. However, drishti, the malevolent way of looking, was an important part of daily interactions. This is a version of the evil eye where a person who looks and thinks with jealousy has harmful impacts on others. The desirable and beautiful, such as little children and young women, are considered to be at a particular risk. Precautions are necessary, and any suspicious sign calls for ritual remedies to avoid misfortune, illness and death. The effects of darshan and drishti are enabled through the porosity between beings and materials in Hindu understandings of the world. Gods and goddesses are present in the environment but are at the same time named and individualized in certain forms. Through continuously repeated worship, puja, performed by priests in temples and by family members in households, particular deities reside in images and sculptures. The deity’s embodied presence makes the sensory engagement with the devotee possible. The close link between beings and objects are further materialized in practices that address the evil eye. The harmful glances are prevented from entering homes by placing unattractive objects at the threshold, such as masks, limes and fur. Children are protected by black dots of soot on the cheeks, and by amulets tied in strings around the neck or belly. Among the non-Brahmin castes, where I spent the main part of fieldwork, perceptions of drishti corresponded with those of the evil spirits, pey. These destructive forces dwell in the vicinities

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and can be activated by one’s neighbour as well as one’s own neglect. Certain deities, in particular the village goddesses, are protective but also hold the capacity for destructive acts. Thus, the presence of positive as well as negative energies and the porosity between human, divine and material entities constitutes a sense of fluidity, but to maintain prosperity and well-­ being, interactions are organized by socioreligious institutions and practices. Kolam images drawn at entrances of houses, at altars in temples and homes, or beneath a tree where the Goddess resides, visualize sites where people and deities constantly re-­establish their relations. Drawn at a temporary street shrine that commemorates the film star and politician M. G. Ramachandran on his birthday, the kolam reinforces the lack of complete separation between different kinds of beings.

Organizing practices Kolam is intertwined with women’s capacity to create and increase auspiciousness. The auspicious and the inauspicious are considered to be important ordering concepts throughout Hindu India (Carman and Marglin 1985; Madan 1985, 1991; Parry 1991; Wadley 1991). The conditions of time, space, events and persons are defined according to how they relate to auspiciousness. The concepts are closely related to different stages in a woman’s lifetime, further intersected with notions of the pure and the impure. A woman enters the ideal auspicious state when she has married and given birth, preferably to a son. It is the fertility and procreative capacity that makes her auspicious, bestowed by the divine feminine energy shakti which also is embodied in the deities. She upholds her auspiciousness through acts that achieve divine blessings, which she in turn channels to her husband, family, house, and surrounding community. Auspiciousness is central to the maintenance of prosperity, health and well-­being, and women are considered to have the capacity as well as the moral responsibility for its daily reproduction. In Tamil Nadu, kolam-making is one the main practices with this effect. On auspicious days when a wedding or a girl’s first menstruation is celebrated, the kolam is enlarged outside particular households or a hall rented for the occasion. During collective festivals, the images are expanded outside every house and almost cover the streets. On inauspicious days following the death of a family member and commemorations of dead ancestors, no kolam is made. Depending on their absence, presence and size, the images communicate the mood within the household as well as affecting the general atmosphere. White shiny sharp-­lined kolam designs drawn in front of the house attract the deities by their beauty and act as invitations to them. But some kolams are considered to be unpleasing and might have inauspicious consequences.

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Deviations from symmetry, uncleaned surfaces, and any visible mistake can offend the deities and make them turn away from the entrance. Thus, auspiciousness has both moral and aesthetic implications. The beauty and perfection of the design are related to the chosen drawing material. Rice flour is the ideal, both as a food offering for insects and birds and through its embodiment of the Goddess who women direct their daily kolams toward.3 But it is considered difficult to use and women prefer a particular kolam powder based on lime stone. The practice is continuously transforming through inventions of less ephemeral materials, facilitating tools and infinite creations of new designs and colour combinations. Yet, its effect of creating beauty and auspiciousness is considered to remain. Evil and inauspiciousness is kept away from the house through cleaning, kolam-making and the divine blessings the practice generates. To maintain well-­being, it is also important that the first person one sees in the morning is auspicious. Diviya explained that she always lights a lamp for the images of the deities on the wall and looks at them before she steps outside to make the kolam. She also takes a quick glance at her family members. Her grandmother makes sure that she always sees her neighbour across the street, who is known as a particularly auspicious woman, before she does anything else. If she glances upon somebody known as harmful by mistake, she immediately turns her eyes towards the neem tree where the goddess Mariamman resides. Darshan thus becomes the remedy. Kolam is not considered to embody a deity and enable benevolent exchanges of looking, but it can facilitate the elimination of drishti. A common rite performed at auspicious functions to remove the harmful effects of the evil eye is to light a camphor flame, place it on a pan leaf on a tray with liquefied red kungumam powder and circle it around the face of the affected person. The fluid substance in the tray absorbs all harm which becomes neutralized as it is poured on the kolam at the entrance of the house. Prospects of well-­being and auspiciousness are further affected by intersecting asymmetrical hierarchies of caste, class, gender, ethnicity, race and language. Caste remains as one of the most distinctive social institutions in India and belonging within a particular group is defined by birth.4 Membership guides the marriage market, political affiliation, spatial organization and based on the principle of ritual purity it authorizes possibilities of proximity and touch. At the same time, the consequences of caste are subject to negotiations and change. The position of certain groups varies regionally and the quota policy allows space in public schools and governmental employment which enables a higher position through financial improvement. Caste is highly politicized in Tamil Nadu, partly based on the non-Brahmin movement which in the early twentieth century opposed the colonial-Brahminical hegemony where Hindu caste practices connected with European theories of race defined South

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Indian Dravidians as lower than Brahmins and their presumed North Indian Aryan background (Dirks 1992; Fuller 1996; Pandian 2007). During fieldwork, caste issues were always present and defining possible and impossible relations between people, deities and the material world. They were expressed in subtle terms of low voices and gestures in everyday interactions, but explicit in the dropping of surnames which define membership and in the physical organization of space. In one of the villages I worked, the streets had been named after their inhabitants’ caste membership, but the Brahmin migration towards better opportunities in the US and the private sectors in Chennai had reshaped this structure. Brahmin Street had become the home of high Vellala groups, and Vellalar Street was dominated by the lower but now politically and socially powerful Vanniyars. However, the Dalits5 remained segregated to an area outside the village based on the Brahminical ritually founded idea of untouchability, both visual and visceral, where the lower castes are considered able to contaminate and thereby harm the higher. In Tamil Nadu and India as a whole, as well as in the South Asian diaspora, Dalits are continuously subject to social injustice and physical violence.6

Kolam and fieldwork photography During the investigation of kolam in Tamil Nadu, my camera was an important companion. Photographic practice, founded in pre-­academic educations of attention towards images and imaging, has been a fundamental tool for my way of making relationships with the world, both in private and professional situations. Even though the anthropological curricula at the university I was enrolled in did not include visual methods, photography became an essential way to approach kolam and its local contexts. I have never considered the camera to be an extension of my body, rather its role in my constitution of relations and images comes closer to Bruno Latour’s analysis of material objects as ‘participants in the course of action’ (2005: 71). As an agent, my camera influences how I move and communicate with the surroundings. The interactions have changed during many years of practice, and were further developed during fieldwork. The following note on my personal development aims to illuminate the heterogeneity of photographic practices and destabilize the dichotomy between image and text. It further points at how the education of attention and subsequent knowledge production can shift through practice. In my youth, raising the camera towards the unacquainted felt embarrassing, knowing how easy it is to misrepresent through one’s own ideas of what is at stake in a particular situation. It was as if the camera increased my shyness and sense of uncertainty. Photography school was imbued with the notion that it takes long term engagement with people in order to accomplish in-­depth

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and ethically sound representations and depictions. Knowledge of how much each image depends on the photographer’s choice of arrangements and type of technical equipment expanded into an awareness of the space for collaborative negotiations offered in photographic situations. Relations that developed in a certain place sometimes lingered by collecting addresses and sending back analogue copies to people involved. Yet, I made my living through a journalistic period in the 1980s where the professionalized camera gave permission to overstep boundaries, such as those between audience and action. It required a certain hardening of the senses and sharpening of elbows to accomplish the taking and delivering of the images expected by the editor. Empathy and the possibility to create relationships and understanding was at risk. This realization brought forth a decision to redirect my photographic practices to the field of collaborative making and the acknowledgement of a tripartite interaction between the person behind the camera, the camera, and the subject in front of it. It was a movement from detached taking to immersive making which was better suited for the field of art practice. The shift from taking to making has been applied in anthropological inquiries of photography and articulates a change of focus from ideological effects and technological determination of a general photography to historical and cultural variations of particular photographic practice (Pinney and Peterson 2003). It concerns a redirection towards knowing from the inside rather than imposing an outside general perspective which links with my photographic aims. Fieldwork in Tamil Nadu was preceded by four years of academic studies which altered my attention towards reading and writing conclusive texts, superior through their presumed focus on contextualization. Among kolam and its makers, my numbed perception was re-­sensitized and I reconnected with embodied photography skills, for example how the knowing of where to stand and position the camera in connection with a subject-­object shifted in relation to the millimetres of different lenses. Eye, body and reflecting mind were again in movement with the environment before I lifted my camera. I experienced a heightened awareness which further brought back my non-­ verbal communication around image-making previously practised in time-­ limited assignments where journalists administered speech. The camera I had chosen for fieldwork had a fixed wide-­angle lens which made it impossible to take portraits from afar, and I had chosen it due to its capacity to open up straightforward photographic situations that require interaction and consent of the people involved. The direction of my camera participated in establishing my interest in kolam and its local environment and my photographic practice often initiated further relationships. The visual engagement had corporeal and visceral dimensions which provided links to the notions of darshan and drishti and functioned as sources of experiential knowledge. I expanded my photographic making, and made the additional practice of bringing

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a notebook where I asked kolam makers to draw their designs, particularly in situations when my interpreter was busy elsewhere. However, the interactions sometimes developed into verbal negotiations beyond my knowledge in Tamil which necessitated a return visit in the company of my assistant. One such incident was the staging of a portrait of a woman who resided on the pavement close to my place of residence in Chennai. She lived an exposed life and it took many weeks before I approached her with by camera. By then, we had already done a lot of small talk and conducted an interview with my assistant. I suggested that we made the photograph in the early morning before the street got crowded and we could have more space, but the woman had a different point of view. She wanted to be photographed as good-looking as possible and argued that this required a proper wash and a clean sari. Her closest site for privacy and water was almost ten minutes’ walk away and shared with several other families who lived on the same street. I approached her again a couple of days later, after I had checked with my assistant that we had a proper agreement and that the woman had had the time to prepare. She chose to sit on the pavement where she made and sold jasmine garlands with her daughter, opposite to the side of the street where they slept and cooked. It was essential that her grandchildren, her future, were included in the portrait. It turned out that the woman expanded her everyday space through her choice of arrangement, and I think she was aware of this outcome. We made the portrait in a context where professional photographers direct their cameras towards beauty and joy at festive occasions, and they participate in reinforcements of important social relations through their documentation of exchanges of gifts central to such events. The occasional tourist cameras were seldom engaged in collaborations with local inhabitants, and I never saw practitioners of the street photography genre who generally work towards the same idea of an un-­staged authentic as photo journalists which thus prevents the possibility of collaborative making. To the people hanging around the nearby tea stall and making shopping errands, it was an anomaly that I photographed a pavement dweller. Yet, they were pulled into the situation by their stares and comments, and the woman in front of my camera was pleased with the attention and sensed a fraction of respect.7 There were appropriate and inappropriate ways of making photographs of kolams. Women showed a negative attitude if I depicted them drawing a design without waiting for and including their closure of its final line. They were particularly sceptical if I made a picture of a kolam that had faded off by the daily abrasion of vehicles and passers-­by. Among hundreds of images from the field, consequently less than a handful show the latter stage of the ephemeral designs. My initial interest in the process of drawing had to be expanded into the local importance of the finished object, and I learned the phrase ‘Kolam makes the image of the house complete’ and its connection to

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the aforementioned beauty and auspiciousness of women. Completeness is an ideal condition of everyday life, constantly sought but only temporarily attained. It holds notions of perfection, described in Hindu texts as the totality and all-­inclusiveness of Brahman where all contradictions lose their identity, and in everyday life as the achievement of prosperity and well-­being in both spiritual and material ways.8 This desired state can only be achieved through the deities’ intervention, and it consequently depends on people’s capacity to communicate with them. When a woman completes her kolam, she generates the beauty that attracts the deities who in turn enter the house and give their blessing. In this moment, completeness and auspiciousness is achieved and reproduced. If the kolam is not made with utmost care and devotion, or if the woman has not taken care of her own appearance, the effect is considered unreachable. There is a sense of identification between woman and kolam, her quest for perfection visualized in the appearance of herself and the image is closely linked to her capacity of becoming the good wife and mother required for the constitution of a prosperous home. The briefness of the kolam’s presence in the form of a flawless sharp image is analogous to the impermanence of completeness. As soon as the image has become smudged, it has lost its beauty and following function to increase prosperity and well-­ being.9 It makes no sense to make a photograph of a design in this condition, nobody would be interested in seeing it. Following the logic of auspiciousness and inauspiciousness, such a photograph might even have harmful effects. The use of photographic practice thus took me further into understanding kolam and its context.

Kolam-making It was enchanting to watch the dexterity of women’s kolam-making in the early mornings. After the threshold and the space in front of the house had been cleaned, the grid of dots and the encircling lines were laid out with graceful swiftness and capability. Women’s skills develop through oscillation between looking at other people drawing in notebooks and on the ground, and trying their own with pen and kolam powder. Verbal comments further enhance their abilities, as when the woman of the house express evaluations of her new daughter-in-­law’s skills, or when women of a neighbourhood decide who has made the best kolam during a temple festival. During public kolam competitions, appointed judges comment according to formalized criteria, and a standardized discourse of a kolam history and which goddess should be approached is disseminated through leaflets and TV shows. There are two main types of designs, kambi kolam where one draws lines around each dot and the pulli kolam where one draw lines from dot to dot. The

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FIGURE 2.1

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former kind is markedly more demanding as it is necessary to end up exactly where one started to not mix up the design. This can only be accomplished if one has memorized visually the exact order of how to proceed. Skill is essential as mistakes lead to incomplete failing designs that open up for uncertainty and potentials of inauspicious events. The morning kolam is considered more decisive while the afternoon practice usually is an occasion for girls to exercise. By participating in related acts of worship, girls gradually learn the religious implications of kolam. The increasing preference for studying rather than kolam-making has made the complex and therefore time consuming kambi type less popular. Time related shifts are further expressed in the development of new tools and materials, where the fastest kind is the plastic adhesive that remain beautiful at least for a year. For women who work outside the home, it has also become practical to hire a maid who makes the daily designs. However, these changes are infused with ambiguity. It is the hand drawn kolam made by the woman of the house which is considered to be made with the greatest care and consequently other practices might be less effective. This notion is intersected by changing fashion and the importance of upward movement in the caste and class hierarchies. New materials and tools, the engagement of maids and the commitment to higher education for girls cost more and when a family display this capacity through their choice of kolam practices, it can eventually lead to better spouses for the daughters and a more secure future for the parents. Some families solved the issue by combining old and new ways, a maid could, for example, be hired on ordinary days while a daughter made the exquisite large kolam on functions and festivals. In other homes, the threshold has a long-­lasting design in acrylic paint and a daily one is drawn on the street. After a few months’ fieldwork, I had acquired a basic understanding of daily interactions, of how to ask questions and how to make photographs. Direct engagements in making the designs evolved as an obvious next step. This new method immediately made me aware of how limited my knowledge was. To assume the correct posture and make the kolam powder trickle down rapidly between the fingers into symmetrical sharp-­edged dots and lines was utterly difficult. I mainly practised indoors and at the back of the house, not to jeopardize the prosperous potential of the day by making mistakes. Earlier verbal explanations of material requirements in order to achieve beautiful designs solidified into sensual experiences of the right flow, the connecting properties between the drawing material and the type of surface, and why the most common powder had turned from the ideal rice to lime stone. My perception of other people drawing as well as of their completed designs changed radically by my commitment to learning the skill.10 At one point when I encountered the exact same type I had just learned to draw, I sensed the bodily rhythm required to get it right. How the hand moves to pick up powder

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from the bowl and lets it trickle down between the fingers, swiftly forming it into a sharp bended line around the dots in the right order according to one’s visual memorization of the design, again picking up, trickling down and turning the body, as a beginner’s version of Diviya’s above described performance. This experience shifted my attention and brought forth thoughts about relations between skill and rhythm, and I began to ask new kinds of questions. Several kolam makers affirmed that it is essential to find one’s rhythm to make beautiful affective designs and that it becomes manifest as a skill, further linked to the necessary concentration that reawakens the connection between body and mind in the early morning. The individual rhythmical skill can in turn be related to movements of the Hindu cosmos in which kolams are situated. The practice is adjusted according to daily rhythms of sunrise and sunset, to monthly rhythms of commemorations of dead ancestors when there is neither moon nor kolam, and to annual rhythms of the harvest festival in January when the sun, as the god Surya, again begins to expand its visibility. The images are enlarged at individual households in relation to auspicious life-­ cycle rituals such as weddings and the function of a girl’s first menstruation, but eschewed when a family member has passed away. These events can perhaps be represented as a list founded on cognitive learning, but their entanglement with the physical environment, the beings who inhabit it and people’s notions of the powers that connect them became more comprehensible as I learned how to draw kolam. The notion of the image as a marker of places where the interaction between humans and divine beings is reinforced was felt rather than only seen. To make the designs increased my sense of being immersed in the local way of being and deepened my insight through experiential knowledge. Searching for relevant theories post fieldwork, Henri Lefebvre’s work on rhythm strengthened this position (2004). He suggests the analysis of rhythms in our everyday lives as a new field of knowledge which traces what might appear as noise to their respective sources and interrelated repetitions and alterations. Lefebvre argues that ‘to grasp a rhythm it is necessary to have been grasped by it; one must let oneself go, give oneself over’ (2004: 27). To understand the multitude of external rhythms and their relations, it is central to first learn the rhythms of one’s own body and use them as points of reference. Following Lefebvre, rhythms shift in every repetition, and they evolve in and around us as interactions between time, space and energy. From a Hindu perspective, the energy that rhythmically move time and space is divine, understood as shakti (or prakriti). It is thus the same energy that makes procreative married women auspicious, and the source many women have given for their skills in kolam-making. The practice is constituted by divine rhythmical movements that connect individual embodied skills with the socioreligious environment, and it simultaneously reconstitutes how these rhythms are lived and evaluated.

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Writing and imaging up The period following ethnographic fieldwork where collected data is analysed, theorized and transformed into a conclusive text is commonly referred to as ‘writing up’. However, borrowing the phrase of the art historian W. J. T. Mitchell who asks ‘What do pictures want?’ (1996), the photographs from Tamil Nadu demanded attention as well. The anthropological framework only allowed their limited inclusion as documents of where I had been and as illustrations of what kolam looked like. From my perspective, intersected by art practice, this made no sense. The weight of my department was heavy and I was after all not aiming for a degree in fine art. But I wanted the photographs to complement the writing and bring the reader and viewer closer to my experiences in the field. I entered into an interconnected mode of ‘imaging up’ where I began to look and think through the images and explore how they could be used in meaningful ways. An integration of photographic material in a written thesis which has been planned already before fieldwork opens up several methodological possibilities. Image making can be conceptualized in relation to on-­going events and their participants and again be used in various experimental and collaborative forms. In the present case, however, it became necessary to find ad hoc solutions. The Tamil notion of kolam as an invitation developed into a central idea and function I aimed to transfer to the photographic part of the thesis. Instead of representing the absent, they were given the role of attracting the readers/viewers, to pull them into an immersed state of being like the making of photographs and kolams had pulled me into the field. By creating a sense of presence, the pictures could potentially make the viewer into a participant in the ambiguous and unpredictable activities of everyday life and increase their understanding by adding experiential knowledge to the intellectual focus of academic texts and the passive informative mode of illustrations. But this required that the reader would be prepared to trust my choices and embrace an unfamiliar use of photography in an anthropological thesis. The main part of several hundred photographs was concerned with kolam and kolam makers in various ways, and they had to be selected and organized to accomplish a sense of intimacy and active way of looking. Captions were excluded to make the viewer able to find their own route into the material, but a certain structure was still required to connect the pictures with the larger whole. The written thesis had the leading role and was not permitted to deviate from the conventional form. Its chapters were developed around themes, and after long considerations the photographs were arranged as essays between them which linked to particular aspects of the themes. For example, the chapter that outlines the main issues that connect kolam with the auspicious married woman and the Hindu goddesses mentions the

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centrality of regularly applying turmeric and kungumam powder to recreate these conjunctions. The subsequent photographic essay focuses on the two powders and their respective yellow and red colours. It visualizes their transformation into other materials and presents various contexts in which they are used. This essay is followed by a chapter that elaborates on materials and designs and situates present preferences in processes of change. A later essay preceding a chapter on the social organization of kolam-making consists of a section of group photographs. These types of images were rarely initiated by me, but are instead examples of photographic constructions dominated by the participants’ authority. The inclusion of friends and family members in these photographs could be understood through the notion of people’s preference for the well-­being of the communal rather individual fame. At the same time, singular portraits became a means to present kolam makers as individuals in Western contexts where people from colonized areas have been perceived as specimens of types. While the writing up influenced the content of the photographic essays, the visual configuration of certain details affected my understanding and altered how the text was written. In the encounter with the reader/viewer, the open-­ended essays provide a pause between the contextualizing and conceptualizing chapters. They allow for visceral immersion and experiential knowledge based in participation and provide a complementary form of understanding. Hereby, the text and photographs convey different but equally important aspects of the kolam practice.

Experience and knowing Kolam is part of a visual and material world that links humans with divine beings. Like people’s worship of deities embodied in images and sculptures, the daily drawing of kolam designs brings forth blessings which enhance well-­ being and auspiciousness. The practice is situated in a context of interactive sensory looking where the positive darshan and the negative drishti affects everyday life. Hindu vision and its related practices can be contrasted with Western-­based traditions of vision as surveillance, for example the prison design Panopticon, discriminating colonial vision, and the idea of a passive perception of data detached from thinking (Laine 2013). However, Eck presents how the perceptual psychologist Rudolf Arnheim has criticized the separation between seeing and thinking within these traditions (Eck 1981: 14f). He argues that looking is a reaching out through which we locate, touch and comprehend our environment in a process where what we see and perceive is constitutive of thought (Arnheim 1969). Eck’s comparison points at overlaps with Hindu perceptions, where darshan accomplishes physical contact that evokes emotion and affect, but also can function as a vehicle for thought. As

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a focus for concentration that joins body and mind, it is a support for meditation and acquisition of divine knowledge (Eck 1981: 45). Many kolam makers have articulated that their drawing accomplishes a sense of concentration through the necessary engagement of both body and mind, and this focus could be directed to the divine as well as to the mundane chores of the coming day. High caste women also make yantra kolams at the household shrine. They are considered to embody gods and goddesses and as yantras etched on copper plates they come in different shapes for different deities. Although the term darshan was not used, these particular designs were described as points of connection that facilitated communication and affective relationships with the divine. The notion of images as vehicles for embodied concentration and access true knowledge can be further compared to the Bildung tradition which developed within the German Romantic movement in the late eighteenth century. Bildung refers to a process of refining knowledge and it emphasized aesthetic experience as key to personal improvement and insight (Liedman 1997: Ch.7). Philosophers like Friedrich von Schelling criticized Immanuel Kant’s division of the subject as knower and the object as mere appearance and suggested art as vehicles of thought. Although Hinduism holds many and sometimes contradicting philosophical strands, the Bildung idea of sensory experience of the material world as constitutive of knowledge establishes a connection with the Indian context. Beholding beautiful art and landscapes was a route to knowledge with divine implications of truth during romanticism, as seeing Hindu imagery provides an exchange of benevolent gazes that evoke visceral affect as well as potential access to divine insight.11 Arnheim argues that what we understand by the objects we see depends on who we are and what we have learned to recognize through previous experiences (1969). This position is further developed within anthropology by Cristina Grasseni who contends that vision is formed through situated social practices and should therefore be understood in plural, as ‘skilled visions’ (2009: 4). She aims for a rehabilitation of the idea of vision by combining Johannes Fabian’s (1983) criticism of Western detached ocularcentrism as the main definition of how we see with studies within the anthropology of the senses that have demonstrated cultural variations of perception and of hierarchies for the senses (Classen 1993, 1998; Feld 1982; Howes 1991, 2003; Seremetakis 1994; Stoller 1989). We learn how to see and understand the world with all our senses in specific ways depending on which social practices and contexts we engage in, similar to Tim Ingold’s emphasis on an education of attention described in the introduction of this book. This ‘enskillment of vision’ takes place in professional and everyday life situations where artifacts, narratives and categories produce the correct way of looking according to particular ethics, aesthetics, ideologies and beliefs (2009: 10). Eyes are trained in coordination with the body as well as the mind and the achieved skill can

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provide a sense of identity and belonging. According to Grasseni, investigations of these practices can illuminate to what extent the communities in which they are performed are open to resistance and creativity relative to their imposition of hegemonic standards (2009: 8). The investigation of kolam expanded from conventional participant observation and semi-­structured interviews to immersive photographic practices and experiments with drawing. This shift enhanced my attention and multisensorial awareness and transformed the idea of collecting data into knowledge as emerging in a process of movement. It reawakened paused skills based in art practice concerned with aesthetics and visual strategies. What people had said about the practice acquired new dimensions and I understood more of what I saw in other people’s drawings. Responses to photographic inquiries shifted my attention to an understanding of completeness and to look at kolam through my new drawing skills of pouring powder onto the ground created an awareness of the necessary embodied rhythm, which in turn made me reflect on related rhythms in the socioreligious context. This affected my ability to connect the everyday practice with morality and aesthetics as well as to approach relevant theoretical frameworks. The immersive mode of engaging in making developed into a tacit knowing which has links with apprenticeship as method. Formal commitment to a locally institutionalized role within crafting has been used as a variety of participant observation, and it has been defined as a way of doing research from the inside out (Coy 1986). It evokes a knowing by doing which enhances the inside perspective of fieldwork, and it provides a possibility to grasp social phenomenon from within as well as through a reflective outside mode. But it has also been criticized for generating a too subjective approach where the ability to step back and analyse, revise and criticize might be lost (ibid). My making was an informal commitment and did not have a particular mentor but it brought forth an increased level of closeness and a sense of being inside the practice. It can be articulated through Ingold’s priority of making over attention towards the already made as a central way of knowing a social and material environment (2013). He argues that the former is a process of moving forward in correspondence with the world which generates a way of knowing from the inside and the latter is a retrospective process which engenders knowledge from the outside. Both are acknowledged as intrinsic to fieldwork which hereby supports the inclusion of close involvement and the intimate link between embodied practice and reflecting mind. Both further became important in relation to kolam as the final image was as important as cleaning and drawing. Photography and kolam drawing during fieldwork was mainly concerned with making relations. However, the presentation necessitated making objects that could be seen and have the capacity to convey knowledge. The imaging up process resulted in open-­ended photographic essays where the

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images were unaccompanied by descriptive texts but instead demanded active attention to be comprehended. Placed in-­between the written chapters, they were invitations to the reader/viewer’s imaginative capacity to situate themselves in fieldwork and participate in relational encounters. They aimed at reconstructing the sense of being immersed and acquiring experiential knowledge, and at enabling trust towards the possibilities of emergent knowledge through photographic essays despite their unfamiliarity in academic accounts. As Hindu images, they had the potential to evoke affection as well as mediate knowledge and insight. At the same time, my insistence on this procedure created an awareness of disciplinary formations within anthropology and hegemonic standards as well as possible negotiations through which ethnographic findings ought to be conveyed. The imaging up after fieldwork further came to include stitching kolams in textile materials. This aided my thinking about and understanding of the role of the practice in the construction of female gender. The textile objects opened up unexpected combinations which could be further developed in relation to art spaces where new issues could emerge. This aim for an unfinished open-­ ended research presentation was beyond conventional academic procedures and took shape as a parallel project and its course will be described in the next chapter.

3 Art making as third space across India and Sweden

FIGURE 3.1

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Forty-­four words, in a pattern, about patterns. Each space in the chart represents an 8 x 1.5 cm piece of white paper of which twenty-­nine has a word related to red dots printed on them. The last third of the pieces were initially left blank. All were arranged beside two red circular everyday objects, a water colour block and a plastic lid, and placed on a table covered with a green cloth. This display constituted the entrance to the exhibition Performative Formations, and with the addition of pencils it invited the visitors to adopt a relaxed mode and participate in the continuation of the associative visualized wordplay. Another fifteen pieces had been filled in at the end of the week-­long exhibition. Performative Formations developed during the writing up of my doctoral thesis, and both projects were finalized in March 2009. The exhibition was a collaboration between the folk artist Malathi Selvam from Puducherry, India, who reconfigured the kolam practice in extraordinary sites; the contemporary artist Kristina Matousch from Malmö, Sweden, who explored symmetrical patterns in relation to daily habits; and myself leaning towards art practice for increased understanding of my anthropological fieldwork analysis. The common denominator for the collaboration was founded in our various interactions with patterns, and our aim was to create a shared space where our works could challenge presumed cultural boundaries and materialize into playful forms and acts. Our theoretical framework employed ‘third space’ (Bhabha 1994) and ‘contact zone’ (Clifford 1997), notions that emerged along postcolonial routes when the global landscape increasingly was formed by migration and following encounters between subjects of cultural difference. The concepts address the potentials of these encounters, and elucidate that the performative agency they produce hold possibilities for creative as well as conflictual exchanges.1 The exhibition was directed towards the creative possibilities of cultural exchange and finalized at the Palm Court Gallery, India Habitat Centre (IHC), New Delhi. This chapter accounts for the development and realisation of Performative Formations. It presents the respective backgrounds of the three collaborators and how our different ways of working arrived at a temporary conjunction. The analysis revisits our multilayered motivations rooted in relationships of exchange and reciprocity, and reinvestigates the chosen theoretical framework. The first section describes how I met Malathi during my doctoral fieldwork, and her commitment to a kolam-­making performed beyond the daily household chore. This is followed by my own explorations of textile practices linked to constructions of femininity, across Indian and Scandinavian contexts. Kristina’s activities on the established Swedish art scene is presented as the missing link in order to accomplish a balanced exhibition where elements of craft and local tradition had a possibility to be accepted in an art gallery. The next part expands on our collaborative working process, during a visit in India, web-­ based connections, and the actual realisation in the gallery. The chapter is

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concluded with a discussion of how we had approached our differences and similarities. While focused on the possibility of creative collaborations across diverse cultural backgrounds, the analysis suggests that the aim for a third space lost its creative potential due to our lack of attention to the presence of valid differences. Although the exhibition was realized and included participatory pieces directed towards the audience, we found ourselves in a zone of conflict where our aspirations of shared authority had become an imagined utopia. This brings in Claire Bishop’s critique of relational aesthetics where she argues that art with a social agenda tends to simplify the process of making relationships and engaging with politics (2004).

Kolam-making beyond household chores Malathi was introduced to me during the first weeks of my doctoral fieldwork in 2005. I was studying Tamil at the linguistic institute in Puducherry, and a common friend recognized a match through our mutual commitment to kolam-making; Malathi as the skilled professional and myself as the curious beginner and outsider. Malathi understood English well, and her manner of sharing paved the way for a close friendship. When my main fieldwork north of Puducherry had come to an end, I revisited Malathi. She asked for my help in disseminating her artistic work beyond Tamil Nadu, and even Sweden had become within possible reach. At that time, our relationship had evolved into a phase where I had to reciprocate Malathi’s generous assistance. It was my duty to organize a show of her works, and I also sensed a possibility to develop my work across art and anthropology. But I felt anxious about the risk of reproducing the exoticizing effect of early nineteenth century world exhibitions and art shows like ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ where people and objects with a background outside the Euro-American region had been decontextualized and turned into spectacles (Clifford 1997; Price 1989). Following Joytindra Jain, director of the Crafts Museum in New Delhi, I imagined a space that questioned the protectionist idea of folk artists as authentic and therefore separated from modern material culture and contemporary art (1998). Kolam in Malathi’s life was intertwined with a devotion that merged her love for art making, the god Krishna, and the artist Rajah Ravi Varma. This could be described as a version of bhakti, the close relationship between a devotee and deity central to popular Hinduism in South India (Fuller 1992: 158). However, Malathi’s triadic commitment had encountered several obstacles and they had brought forth an awareness of how power hierarchies governed her choices. She wanted more independence, and as kolam was considered to be a suitable form of feminine creativity, a reconfiguration of the practice became her tool to move outwards.

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Malathi’s house was full of her art works, drawings and paintings hanging on walls, sculptures and embroidery placed on shelves, and several photographic albums prolonged the presence of her ephemeral kolam works. Objects like garlands and little faces were made in textile, soap, clay, plastic packing materials, ice-­cream sticks, or whatever had been at hand. There were also certificates on the wall that referred to her skills. The most significant had the title Kalai Arasi, Queen of Art, which she had received as the winner of a kolam competition in the town she lived before marriage. Malathi’s father had always been strict with his daughter’s whereabouts, and the reason he allowed her to participate in this particular performance was because of its indoor location. The skills Malathi had acquired were self-­taught and practised at home, and extended into art lessons where middle class housewives came to learn pencil drawing and kolam making. When Malathi received the certificate, she was approached by a rich woman of the high Chettiyar caste who wanted to know more about the young woman’s capabilities. The Chettiyar woman visited Malathi’s house and explained to the father that his restrictive demands bereaved people from the blissful experiences of his daughter’s work. The woman claimed immediate change. The father’s consent to this intervention needs to be understood from an intersectional perspective. The woman’s prominent age and caste belonging superseded the Vanniyar identity and lack of financial resources of Malathi’s family, hereby enabled a man to be subordinate to a woman. The relationship between the two women developed into a patron–­artist arrangement, common in pre-­colonial India and Sri Lanka (Coomaraswamy 1956; Guha-Thakurta 1992). The patroness assisted Malathi in developing customer relations, which increased the artist’s income and produced social visibility for them both. Malathi was hired to make festive kolams at puberty functions and weddings of wealthy families, and her perfection of figurative designs with contrasting and vivid colours became fashionable. Even more in vogue was her recent innovation of transferring a photographic depiction of the subject of celebration, for example a wedding couple, into a kolam. The extra income was useful in Malathi’s household and even more important for her sense of self-­worth and independence. She was allowed to have a certain say in the negotiations about her future spouse, and was pleased to marry a man that was positive towards her artistic aims. When they had settled in Puducherry, the mother-­in-­ law agreed to draw the daily kolams while Malathi took care of the advanced large ones made at auspicious occasions. The change of place and following loss of network had caused insecurity, but by the time I arrived, Malathi had learned to cope without her former hometown and patroness. Her recent assignments included workshops on kolam making, formal judgements of competitions, and her own series on a local TV channel where she taught designs and techniques.

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It was important for Malathi to describe her work as art. She had internalized the higher value of fine art in comparison with folk art and craft, which was implemented in India through art schools established by the British colonial administration (Guha-Thakurta 1992). Realistic depictions with proper perspective had been institutionalized as the imagery of progress, while abstract indigenous art was defined as superstitious and backwards.2 The paintings of Ravi Varma, one of Malathi’s main inspirations, combined the British aesthetic ideals with local versions of deities and mythological beings which made him into one of the most popular artists in India. Through mass produced prints, his works of Hindu gods and goddesses have proliferated into people’s homes and puja places where they are revered alongside small statues to invite the deities’ presence. Malathi’s perception of art was founded on these popular works along with the religious sculptures and imagery in Hindu temples. She did not have access to the contemporary art scene in Chennai, and had a sense of modern art as being incomprehensible. Her weak position, defined by the intersecting hierarchies of caste, class, and gender, and enhanced by lack of education, prevented Malathi from access to this art world.

Thinking through cuts and stitches My relationship to art making revived through fieldwork, and it developed along new routes during my writing up period. After my return to Sweden, the movements and rhythms of kolam-making lingered physically as embodied knowledge. The long-­term engagement of actively observing, photographing and drawing with pen as well as powder continued as further explorations in different materials. Photography has been a main media in my image making, and the initial experiments with kolam designs were based on pictures from fieldwork. I returned to the technique of creating multilayered collages in Photoshop, a skill I had developed during both artistic and commercial practices. Portraits of women were combined with backgrounds of white dots and lines, pointing at the close connection between them. Women’s faces and bodies were also combined in symmetrical patterns resembling kolam structures, and sometimes moving towards yantra forms. Since early fieldwork, I had recognized a similarity between kolam and the appearance of lace and this notion increased as I composed the collages. The elements of white regular patterns, infinite symmetry, and rhythms incorporated into the lines pushed me towards a necessity to translate the kolam patterns into lace. Whenever I could allow myself to put the writing up aside, drawers and boxes in my attic were turned inside out in quest for the right kind of lace. Then I searched second hand shops for suitable large textiles on which the lace could be stitched into kolams. I examined my notebooks from the field,

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and chose a design that had been one of my favourites while learning how to draw. The design was laid out in long ribbons of lace on black textile, beginning with the dots as is the case with ordinary kolams. The necessity of perfect symmetry was internalized, and I used a measuring tape and needles to place each dot in precise relation to the others. When the lace lines were finally pinned, I began a stitching that almost turned into acts of obsession. In spite of threads all the time getting enmeshed in the needles holding the lace, and my fingers getting annoyingly pinpricked, I could hardly stop before the piece was finished. I had always detested to stitch, but it was something about my engagement in kolam, and the affection of my grandmother who had made the lace I was using. The act became a love-­hate performance entangled in intimate relationships. The intense and repetitive stitching generated thoughts about further connections between kolam and the European tradition of making lace. The at times slower pace of working brought me further into my own memories. I recalled my Finnish grandmother’s statement about the importance of displaying neatly made lace and embroidery in the house: ‘It is a must in order to show that the woman of the house is proper and takes care of her household duties in the correct way.’ This reflected the identification between maker and resulting image among the kolam makers I encountered during fieldwork. A woman’s character was considered to be closely linked to her skills in kolam drawing, and well-­made designs articulated the essential capacities for adjustment and self-­control (Laine 2009: 363–9). My analysis of the role of kolam in constructions of Tamil femininity directed towards the written thesis became interwoven with my self-­reflexive search for related notions of womanhood in my own background. Both processes were spurred by and merged with my engagements in stitching more kolam designs. I initially felt detached from the values articulated by my grandmother, and conceived this position as a continuation of my mother’s dismissal of handicraft as an articulation of an old-­fashioned housewife ideal. She followed the feminist movement during the 1960s and focused on education and work outside the home. However, at the celebration of my daughter’s baccalaureate which took place in parallel with my doctoral work, I caught myself laying the tables with my grandmother’s embroidered cloths to make a display that was as attractive and inviting as possible for the guests. Then my method developed a partly destructive mode, where I cut my grandmother’s symmetrically embroidered tablecloths into ribbons before reconstructing them into kolam designs. At the same time as I aimed to slice away unwanted feminine dispositions, my curiosity and increased understanding of Tamil approaches to kolam engendered a renewed sense of familiarity with my own background. Parts of my history showed points of convergence with kolam-making in India, and I found further connections in the art historian Rozsika Parker’s accounts of

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the centrality of embroidery skills in the creation of domestic femininity during the Victorian era in Britain (1984) and their further dissemination by colonial movements. I realized that a display of my kolam textiles could articulate an interaction between cultural frameworks. Perhaps it could also link forward through contemporary feminist embroidery which had become part of my daughter’s practices, and expanded into the field of public art (Buszek 2011). The processes of cutting, stitching, writing and reading theories on constructions of feminine identity informed each other and situated me in a state where thinking and making was intertwined. This condition increased my awareness of how everyday practices become embodied as notions of common sense as well as reflected knowledge. The realization of how deeply I had internalized my grandmother’s values, which I formerly had judged as insignificant remnants of the past, enhanced my understanding of what it means to embody a gender identity, and how it can be shaped by performative acts. This self-­reflexive process was initiated by fieldwork experience, and intertwined with theoretical frameworks of gender construction in South India. My analysis of kolam as a central daily practice that reinforces femininity and female gender is informed by Cecilia Busby’s assessment of gender as a fixed attribute with both bodily and performative features (Busby 2000: 21; Laine 2009: 390–3). To incorporate both aspects, Busby combines performativity with practice theory. She recognizes Judith Butler’s argument that the reiteration of appropriate gender performances establishes a person as feminine or masculine (Butler 1999), but emphasizes that performance also contains actual material practice (Busby 2000). Through Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptualization of how socially constructed practices become embodied and naturalized within the individual as habitus (1977), Busby emphasizes that physical bodies can be materially altered. This understanding of how a certain disposition can be altered by performative agency in everyday acts corresponds with my experiences of gender construction in the kolam context. It further connects with stitching practices in the European context, and my own formations of kolam designs. The element of cultural overlap in the two traditions engendered new thoughts about possible collaborations with Malathi. But I still sensed that it was not enough for an exhibition of both artistic and theoretical insights.

Reduction, addition and repetition Kristina and I met a few months after my return from fieldwork in 2006, when she had an exhibition in my present home town, Gothenburg. We had attended the same foundational art school and been co-­participants in a preparatory course for a next step in art education around ten years earlier. But our interactions parted successively as Kristina made her way into the Swedish

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art scene and my trajectory moved towards anthropology. When I visited Kristina’s exhibition at the gallery Mors Mössa, I was taken aback. Her explorations of symmetrical formations in everyday life resonated with my experiences of kolam. Suddenly, I sensed the missing link in my aim to curate an exhibition with Malathi’s work and my textile kolams. An established contemporary artist would fulfil the expectations of a fine art gallery and our collaboration around a theme could mitigate the risk of perceiving the kolam related objects as an exoticizing and othering of Indian popular art. I explained the situation to Kristina and we decided to take a closer look at each other’s practices. The everyday patterns in Kristina’s work emerged in a reverse process in relation to kolam. Instead of adding material to a surface, she engaged in reduction through the manner of making holes. Her preference for metal sheets and plexiglass created a smooth solid object essentially different from the ephemeral kolam. One of the pieces at her exhibition was a white aluminium sheet perforated with the symmetrical pattern of a flattened shopping basket. In addition to visual resemblances of the kolam structure, it was something about the cut outs that further resonated with the chopping of my grandmother’s tablecloths. A notion of the need to destruct in order to create anew and move forward. At the time, Kristina explained that one part of her motivation was a criticism of the amount of energy wasted on packing material and other containments of what we actually can handle as it is. Another reference to this idea was her previous performance Take it in your hand where she had set up a grocery shop and presented the visitors with eatables such as meat devoid of plastic wrapping but also fruits robbed of their peel. It made sense for the connection to kolam that Kristina was engaged in patterns not only as visual shapes but as materializations of social norms and their enactments in daily life. As such, her repetitive reductions by making holes in the material became additions in the form of new meaning. Kristina did not engage explicitly with power relations or theoretical discourses. She described herself as an independent artist, without a need to explore the boundaries of art or femininity in her work. However, she was provoked by Sigmund Freud’s model of women’s bodies and sexuality as passive due to their lack of visible genitals and assumed development of penis envy. At the same exhibition at Mors Mössa, Kristina showed the performance piece Subject inside object where she had entered a large cardboard tube and stuck out her thumb through a little hole approximately at penis height of a little man. Her sense of humour was alluring. I was further attracted by Kristina’s interest in Fluxus, a loosely organized art collective that developed in the 1960s and had confronted the separation between art and everyday life through experimental performances and pedagogical methods (Higgins 2002).3

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Puducherry and New Delhi as sites of collaboration When I had presented my textiles, showed photographs of Malathi’s work, and explained the overlaps I perceived between our engagements in everyday patterns as female artists, Kristina took interest in my suggestion of a collaboration. Malathi was on board immediately. We discussed several options, for example the possibility of making an exhibition that could be presented both in India and in Sweden. It was necessary that we met together in order to move forward. Kristina and I submitted a joint application for funding, and as the person who had the best overview of our three points of entry I took on the role as coordinator. I did not have full overview of the Indian art scene, but an awareness of its minimal existence in Chennai. New Delhi came across as a place that could link our differences, and my contact Alka Pande provided a gallery space at the IHC. The application stated that the participants shared an aim to explore similarities and differences in depth, and were prepared to enter the chaos, or playful confusion, that can occur in such encounters. Further, we declared an intention to develop a common platform where new formations could emerge and develop. Categorizations such as art and craft, male and female, public and private, would be challenged and reworked through artistic as well as anthropological practices. When Kristina and I were ready to set off to India and our preparatory journey, I worried about the possibilities to accomplish these aims. My anthropological knowledge of the necessity of long term fieldwork to grasp a new situation was at odds with Kristina’s decision to only allot two weeks for the journey. The arrival in India was planned to fit the Mylapore festival in Chennai. This is a celebration of Tamil cultural heritage and it includes a large kolam competition. Our schedule further incorporated the following Pongal festival to let Kristina experience both daily and celebratory kolam practices, and a visit to New Delhi to become acquainted with the chosen gallery. In addition, I had brought a video camera to explore new presentations of kolam-making, and compiled several questions for my doctoral thesis to investigate with central research subjects from my earlier fieldwork. But the most important task was to visit Malathi in Puducherry. The interactions with Malathi became intense, and we all put a lot of effort into openness and adjustments to each other and the situations that arose. I became the translating anthropologist interpreting between Kristina and Malathi’s different notions of their practices, where the former came from the European tradition of figurative art moving towards conceptualism and abstraction, and the latter away from the abstract kolam tradition aiming to master the look of Ravi Varma’s oil paintings in coloured powders strewn on the floor. Kristina was trained into the ideal of the artist as an individual

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innovator, while Malathi acknowledged skill in the capacity to produce likeness of an original. It was a delicate move to make space for their trajectories to intersect instead of turning them into parallel and separate routes. The joint project felt fragile and I was uncertain if my collaborators really were interested in my anthropological aims of crossing cultural boundaries. After a few days, when Malathi had digested Kristina’s presentation of her work through photographs and on the web, she came up with a groundbreaking idea. She responded with a floor drawing that reflected ‘Latticework’, a piece where Kristina had filled a window with toilet paper rolls that accomplished a pattern of objects and their interstices. Both artists were finally able to experience some of the overlaps I had tried to explain, and we began to work. Kristina’s attention to metal grids enabled Malathi and myself to perceive new visual connections between kolam designs and the bars that commonly protect doors and windows in Tamil streets. We explored various ideas of making solid patterns that could hang from the ceiling and correspond with floor drawings through shadows they would cast. Hereby, our works had a potential to engage with the architecture of the gallery space. Available funding played a large role in the realization of the project. Only Kristina and I could go to New Delhi and visit at the gallery during this initial phase and this generated a certain imbalance in our collaboration. Ideally, we should all participate in every stage. I was further worried about the risk of not receiving enough money to cover tickets for Malathi’s family when we would make the journey for the actual exhibition. Women are expected to travel with male family members, and I did not want to interfere too much in her level of independence or respectfulness. However, Malathi said that it did not matter if she had to travel alone and that she wanted to go ahead with our plans. At the same time, Kristina needed to address her capacity to travel and spend time in India without me. She sensed a loss of independence and it was decided that I should leave her at Malathi’s in Puducherry for a few days and then meet up in Chennai before our flight to New Delhi and the gallery visit. The Mughal architecture in the Old Delhi environment we explored together conversed directly with our ideas of connecting patterns on ceilings, walls and floors. The symmetrical ornaments on the walls inside Jama Masjid corresponded with patterns on its floor tiles, and screen work at the Red Fort where geometric forms carved into marble created shadows on the ground, provided further materials to work with. The organic shapes grounded in nature attracted Kristina as a contrast to what she regarded as more angular and boxed elements in European structures. Kristina and I approached Alka Pande in a light-­hearted mood, and she introduced us to the Palm Court Gallery where she was the director and head curator. At the time, we did not think about Alka as a main actor able to set the parameters of our endeavour, which will be discussed below, but rather as

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a facilitator that would support our plans. Exploring the premises, Kristina was caught by the large red circles placed on the next-­door office windows to prevent birds from flying into them. She suggested that we could use the red dot in the exhibition as a form and sign that the visitors could fill with content of their own ideas, and this is how the introductory pattern of this chapter came into being. We had not had time to talk about the significance of the red dot in Hindu culture. But now I explained how a red round kunkumam pottu on a woman’s forehead materializes the auspicious capacities considered to be embodied in the sumangali, the married child bearing woman. At last we had pinned down a meeting ground that I knew would be central for Malathi. Talks on how we could expand the dialogue between the immediate environment and the gallery continued. The IHC housed a diner, and the American advertizements on the walls held potential visual overlaps with the figurative kolams Malathi wanted to explore. We agreed that it was central to convey the kolam as a living tradition that was in flux with its surroundings, and discussed how ongoing processes of change could be included in the exhibition. Kristina pondered on a performance, Malathi could perhaps make new kolams every day, and the video material I had recorded during our stay could be formed into a loop structured as a pattern of continuous kolam-making. When we left India, the plans had come far but we decided to focus only on New Delhi and postpone the potential for a second exhibition in Sweden. When the necessary relations had been established, I explained how the notions of third space and contact zone could be used to frame our exhibition. The possible overlaps had been part of our conversation since we met in Gothenburg, and the collaborative journey provided enough opportunities to continue on this path. There was a certain mutuality in our challenges of conventional ideas and their materialization, Malathi and I of ideal female patterns visualized in kolam and embroidered cloth, and Kristina of consumption habits and expectations of the artist’s adding to a material surface. Although Kristina’s practice was motivated by conceptualism and Fluxus, she disclosed an awareness of materiality in her preference for metal sheets over textile. Perhaps this choice was another example of cutting off female ideals. We agreed on the aim to present a site where our collaborative pieces and performances could effect challenges and reformulations of cultural difference. My suggestion of the title Performative Formations meant to incorporate this effect, and it was further informed by the notion of how repeated performative acts could constitute a person’s identity. Kristina maintained that her art practice was driven by concepts rather than materials, and this framework made sense to her. Her work with performance made the transformation into performative via speech act and social theory comprehensible. I knew it could not be possible to get Malathi’s consent until we met in person, and unfortunately, there were several delays.

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Realizations of similarities and differences One year passed between our collaborations in Puducherry and New Delhi and the actual realization of the exhibition. The first period entailed increased planning with developments of sketches, editing of my video, and refinement of the text that would accompany our works. However, it was difficult to maintain contact with Malathi on distance and the lack of dialogue weakened our commitment. It could only be countered with face to face interaction and I decided to spend more time in Puducherry before the exhibition. We had not managed to get enough funding to bring Malathi’s family to New Delhi, and I promised to accompany her on the flight. An unexpected amount of regulations regarding the gallery space that Alka had sent us also needed to be grasped and worked through. When my doctoral thesis was printed and a date set for my public defence, I set off. Malathi’s house was in tension. Her father and brother had come down from Salem, and they were upset about the idea of Malathi travelling without the company of male relatives. The usual calmness was pierced with harsh words and outright arguments. I was in no way the bringer of good news, and the patience I always had during fieldwork was considerably shortened. However, Malathi was able to persevere due to her husband’s support. We reviewed the material I had brought along, and although my textual framework and the title did not seem as important to Malathi as actual practice, she articulated an acceptance of what I presented. Again, I felt uneasy about how little time we had for actual collaboration. Only one week could be arranged with the three of us in New Delhi. Before the departure, Malathi had to prepare her working materials. She mixed kolam powder with various colours for hours, and in case the right kind was not to be available in New Delhi a whole suitcase was filled. When the three of us converged in New Delhi, we all brought different streams of anxiety and pressure. Practical constraints and lack of dialogue with the gallery staff created serious obstacles, but long-­term engagements were at stake and there was no way of backing out for either of us. The idea to create an installation with plastic baskets used for grocery was dismissed by the hygiene standards at IHC. The centre revealed itself as a site with firm boundaries. I already knew that as an establishment for art and research it was dominated by upper caste and class intellectuals, but I did not imagine the exclusion of elements beyond this community to be as firm. I sensed the relevance of my academic level, and why Malathi put such effort into making art rather than craft. Kristina felt disrespected and uncomfortable, I was sick of coordinating and Malathi worried about her daughter in Puducherry. As the opening day drew closer, we became more and more edgy. We regained common ground by excursions around the Paharganj area to find red materials for our dots and circles, and crafting it together in our hotel room. Negotiations

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FIGURE 3.2

evolved of how Malathi’s floor drawing could correspond with my kolams of textile, expanded with one of plastic lace, and Kristina’s large grids in black ink on white rice paper that we had brought from Sweden. Disparities in aesthetic preferences manifested themselves in our final pronouncements. Kristina had chosen to make a performance based in a Fluxus event4 at the opening, which was in line with my experimental video that conveyed kolam as ongoing daily practice. However, Malathi suddenly refused to make drawings in front of an audience. People who saw her draw often asked a lot of questions and she argued that if there were many visitors in the gallery, her concentration would be ruined and the images would not be completed in the correct way. Her concern resonated with my knowledge about the daily morning kolam as making the image of the house complete (Laine 2009: 138). In Hindu practice, completeness visualizes auspiciousness and prosperity, and it is aimed for in ritual offerings as well as daily practice.

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This notion is at odds with Fluxus which encourages the beginning of a new piece without having imagined its end, and explores the role of chance in the process (Higgins 2002). The movement’s interest in breaking the boundaries between institutionalized art and everyday life provided a certain overlap with kolam-making in a gallery for fine art, but Malathi’s decision to not make an ordinary kolam at the entrance because she wished to emphasize her work as art separated from everyday life turned the situation upside down. Things were spinning out of control through the unexpected amplification of the subtle noises that previously had passed unheard in our interactions. Vehemently pushing them away, we slipped into physical ailments and complaints about the gallery staff. After a long week, we could finally open the exhibition. Our performative formations were in place and the visitors showed appreciation and were curious to participate in the play of red dot associations. Although we had lost parts of the connection with everyday objects and ongoing practices, Kristina managed to perform an act of endurance pouring water between glass bottles arranged as a geometrical shape with her body in the centre. When the water had transformed into pools outside the bottles or merely evaporated in the heat, the act was complete. The next day Kristina left for another assignment, while Malathi and I stayed in the gallery during the remaining days of the show. The space had turned into a confinement rather than a site for playfulness and shared authority, and we lost track of our initial motivations. The evaluations I tried to accomplish afterwards could not assess why we failed to collaborate in a productive manner throughout the project.

FIGURE 3.3

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Third space potentials The joint project aimed to create a third space between ourselves and the gallery audience where collaboration would embrace politics of equal rights and destabilize social conventions and cultural differences. It evolved into two closely intersecting processes, the making of the exhibition and the exhibition itself. The first, which has been the main focus of this chapter, aimed for collective labour based on shared authority between the three of us and the second concerned how this work established an open process in the gallery where the audience engaged as active participants in our performative formations. The concepts third space and contact zone emphasize that it is the acknowledgement of difference that enables new cultural formations to emerge. Bhabha even use the term ‘incommensurable’ to define the distance between these differences (1994: 312). In hindsight, it became obvious that our inability to succeed in our collective labour lay in the lack of attention to these differences, in their actuality as well as in the conceptualizations we used. The project was guided by a conviction of the possibility to overcome various ways of being and working, but it did not examine closely what the differentiations consisted of or what they might implicate. This method caused avoidance, which piled up into serious frustrations during the last phase. I suggest that our collaborations would have been more productive if we had acknowledged that third space and contact zone involve a potential for conflict. Instead of merely focusing on our shared interests in patterns, symmetry and repetition, we should have scrutinized our differences and worked through them. Then we could have negotiated a number of issues, such as: how independently Kristina and I could work in comparison with Malathi’s dependence on social and kinship hierarchies; that our aesthetic preferences were in disjunction as Malathi strived for completeness, and Kristina and I intended to include the working process; that Kristina was indifferent to the relation between art, folk art and craft, while Malathi and I wanted to challenge the elevation of the former; and that simultaneously, Malathi experienced a need to be recognized on the fine art scene, while Kristina and I could afford to question the separation between art and everyday life. Malathi embodied a cultural practice where I was a beginner and Kristina a curious onlooker, but perhaps I had an upper hand in knowing both the Indian and Swedish contexts. Further on my behalf, I failed to give thorough consideration to the fact the other two did not share my anthropological interest in comprehensive understandings of cultural phenomena, and therefore ignored the necessity of a longer time frame during our interactions. The lack of attention to difference and conflict and the way this hampered our creative work can be further related to Bishop’s critique of Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of relational aesthetics (2004). She argues that his focus on

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generating harmonious relations and a sense of feeling good as the main criteria for evaluating socially and politically engaged art suppresses the productive potential of conflict and hereby becomes anti-­democratic. Following Bishop, Bourriuad centres on what people have in common and therefore fails to critically investigate to the intentions of the artist, whom the work is directed towards, the quality of the established relations and the broader context they are positioned in. Although I applied a critical approach to the exhibition context, the negative outcome of silencing dispute in favour of an interest in the shared is applicable to how we flawed in maintaining collaboration on equal terms between ourselves and partly took refuge in aesthetic judgements of our works. But the artistic strategy of relational antagonism that Bishop suggests instead reaches way beyond what I find ethically acceptable. One of the artists she uses to exemplify this tactic is Santiago Sierra, who has used people with subordinated social and cultural backgrounds, such as illegal migrants, and in exchange for a small payment has had their backs tattooed or their hair dyed blonde and installed them in galleries. Bishop interchangeably refers to these people as ‘collaborators’, ‘participants’ and ‘performers’ (2004: 70), and does not refer to their eventual relationships with the artist beyond their allotted ‘salary’. She compliments Sierra for his tough reiteration and exposure of the hierarchical discomforts caused by global capitalism and henceforth disrupting the audience and their expectations in a progressive manner, but the artist himself argues that he does not believe in the possibility of change (ibid: 71).5 According to Bishop, artists within this antagonistic field make better and more political art than those engaged with relational aesthetics and that they importantly point at the limitations of what can be defined as art in relation to what is social. In the case of Performative Formations, we all believed in the possibility to change, and the expectations of the upper middleclass audience at the conventional IHC gallery was certainly disrupted by the questions we asked about the separations between art and craft, Indian and Swedish, male and female, public and private, which several of the visitors attested to during the show. Our strategy was to establish a playful environment that challenged these categories, where particularly the Fluxus performance and the participatory red circle piece would activate the audience into open processes of relating to each other and the works while rethinking ‘naturalized’ values and practices. To a large extent, we relied on the general notion of aesthetic capacity within modern and contemporary art where it is able ‘to transform our perceptions of difference and to open space for forms of knowledge that challenge cognitive, social or political conventions’ Kester 2011: 11). It could be argued that the tense mode that developed between us artists reduced the positive mode we wanted the exhibition to work through, but I maintain that our artworks and their effects would not have been improved if we had focused

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on exposing these tensions, and certainly not by using Sierra’s practices of humiliation and violence based on the power relations we already know dictate our world. An environment infused with discomfort could also have a confining and passivating effect on the audience. In spite of the problems that arouse in our collaboration, the Performative Formations project points to the fact that there are alternatives to Bishop’s polarized models and other standardized procedures but that they will remain utopian unless risks are taken. Based on the experiences of making and thinking through this exhibition and its simplified notion of third space, a more thoroughly participatory and collaborative public project was formed a few years later and it is accounted for in Chapter 7.

4 Photo-­poetic essay

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We draw kolam with love and affection. On Fridays and auspicious events, we make large kolams. I would love to make big kolams every day, but I don’t have time because of all my household duties. Sometimes, when I can’t stop myself from giving the design a little extra work, my mother-in-­ law complains. Before marriage, when I lived in my mother’s house, mum complained about all the time I wasted on kolam. But I kept on drawing until they forced me to stop and take on other chores. I draw kolam with love and great interest, I always try to find time to put it.

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Last year, we could finally afford to tear down our old mud hut and construct a new house in concrete. At the inauguration, my daughters and I painted kolams at the entrance and on the floor in acrylic paint with many colours. We have a tiled floor and a kolam in loose powder would be risky, a guest who walks over it may slip and get hurt. These painted kolams have become worn out, and soon, when we celebrate my eldest daughter’s first period, we will make new ones. It is an auspicious day and we will invite many guests. The new kolams will make the guests feel welcome, and all passers-­by will see that we are celebrating and happy.

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In the olden days, everybody drew kolams in raw rice powder, it’s like food for the ants and other small creatures. The kolam is drawn as a good deed, it’s to give. It should foremost be made for blessings . . . Then to create beauty. The ants cannot eat the stone powder we use today. But I use rice powder on special occasions. The Goddess prefers rice powder, because it means that we give. Then she will come to us with greater joy. If the space outside the entrance is empty when she is passing by, she will think: Something unpleasant has happened here, then I will not enter today . . . If we put kolam, the house will be blessed and the home will have an auspicious atmosphere. The family will be healthy . . . I never plan designs beforehand. When I have put the dots, the lines will come automatically. It is the Goddess who gives me the power to do it.

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Kolam-making is like physical exercise. My servant helps me to put them on the street, and in front of the altar I have one in plastic adhesive that remains longer. Sometimes I make kolams myself, to not get problems with my blood pressure and weight. It’s like yoga. You stretch the back as you bend forward, and you stretch your fingers as you strew the powder. Just like in yoga, you exercise the coordination between mind and body, you practise your concentration and get a good rhythm.

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During the harvest festival, we often draw an overflowing pot in our kolam designs. After the harvest, we boil new rice in a new clay pot. It’s made to boil over, and then we pay attention to which direction it overflows. The direction tells about what the coming year will be like . . . The pot is like an auspicious woman that is overflowing with new life.

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I make a kolam for Virgin Mary every Friday, on the floor in front of our altar in the house. I also make a kolam for her at her temple in our street during festivals. But only if there are adult relatives around. I don’t want to put daily kolams outdoors, the boys who live here wouldn’t leave me alone . . . They tease me and ask why I do women’s work . . . But I like to draw, and I often make kolam designs in my notebook.

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My mother taught me how to make kolam, because she hoped that I would get married to a man who owned a proper house where I could put kolam every day. But the man I married, he is dead now, lived on the pavement just like us. I didn’t think it would become any different for my daughter, and therefore I have not taught her how to draw kolam. And she hasn’t taught her daughter either . . . Some of the shop owners in this neighbourhood ask me to take care of the entrance to their businesses in the morning. If the shop is owned by a Muslim I only clean, if a Hindu owns it I also draw a kolam.

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At my house, we have a servant who puts kolam and cleans the steps, every morning and afternoon. I don’t have time, I have to rush to school. When I come home, I have to do my homework, and I have to help mum to do the cooking. But I learned how to put kolam when I was little . . . During festival occasions, I make kolam together with my neighbour in front of our houses. We have lots of fun then, we are allowed to buy kolam powder in many different colours, and nobody asks us to hurry up. We usually make sketches beforehand, and then we go out early in the morning or late at night to begin the drawing. During the month before the harvest festival, we put kolam every morning, then we go to the temple and to school. We pray for good results at our exams, and particularly for good husbands.

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It’s not what the kolam looks like that matters most, it’s more important how it feels. But there are some designs that we only draw at our altars. Every weekday has its own design, one for each planetary God. We also draw a sacred word as part of the design. We can’t make those kinds of designs in the street, if somebody steps on them it’s like stepping on God . . . then God would be disgraced.

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My father-in-­law just passed away, and we couldn’t participate in the temple festival this year. We will not put a kolam outside our house for nine days. Everybody sees and knows. Every month when the moon has waned, you find the same absence in front of most houses. Then we invite our ancestors and commemorate them at their altar where their portraits hang. Some women have kolam tattoos on their hands, arms and ankles. The image will be with them even after their death, but this is no longer in fashion.

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We draw kolam with devotion. God has given us everything, so we should give back in thanks and praise. We make kolam to invite God into our house. To make it beautiful, to make it into a home. It adds beauty and well-­being to the family. Only then will the family be happy. All the procedures we do for God begin with kolam . . . We can make kolam for all Gods and Goddesses, but we usually draw it for the deity that is closest to us. Many draw kolam for Lakshmi, the Goddess who gives prosperity and auspiciousness. I draw kolam to invite the Goddess Mariamman. But on Lord Murughan’s birthday, I put my kolam for him. I used to make kolam for Angalamman at her temple every Friday. Then she gave me more blessings, which give more prosperity and well-­being to my family. Now, my knees are failing. My daughter-in-­law has taken over, in the temple as well as at home.

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Before we draw the kolam, we clean in front of the house. The best way is to use cow dung mixed with water. Then we sweep thoroughly. Cow dung protects. God is in the dung, and therefore it becomes clean and pure when we use it. It protects from all evil, from bacteria and illness. We have to learn before we get married, to keep the place tidy and neat in order to make the family healthy and joyful.

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My mother told me that I have to put all kolams myself after marriage. Nobody will put it with the same care and neatness. Now, I work full time as a teacher, I have four children and no mother-in-law who lives nearby and can help. I don’t have time for kolams. It’s important that my daughters do their homework, good education is the only way to get somewhere. My husband helps me a lot indoors, but I would never let him put kolams outside. The people would question what kind of woman I am that can’t put the kolam myself. And men control so many other areas, we want to keep this knowledge among us women. Actually, I have employed a woman from the neighbourhood to make the kolam for me.

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5 Engagements in the ethnographic museum and contemporary art galleries

FIGURE 5.1

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The photo-poetic essay that constitutes the previous chapter was originally

formed as a piece for exhibition walls. Titled Auspiciousness, it was part of a solo show that developed from the exhibition in New Delhi, described in Chapter 3, and is presented in Figure 5.1 above. While Performative Formations was made as a conventional art exhibition, albeit questioning hierarchies between art and craft and the upper caste and class supremacy in the gallery, the new exhibition was directed towards spaces that could host a combination of art and research. Kolam – ephemeral patterns for eternal prosperity was organized into two parts where the first had a didactic character with photographs of kolam being drawn in Tamil Nadu streets and texts that described the practice and my choice of presenting research through an exhibition format and the second part expanded my artistic interpretations of kolam in textile, video and photography. Together, they presented kolam as a creative social process as well as a material object, and emphasized that images not only express or mirror cultural conceptions, but also take part in their construction. The exhibition has been shown at the Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm, at the Blue Place Cultural Centre, Gothenburg and at the Brunei Gallery, London, between 2010 and 2012. The artistic section intended to bring the audience closer to everyday life of fieldwork, where the ambiguity of social interactions was re-­enacted through the uncertainty and openness of artworks. Auspiciousness additionally aimed to give voice to individual kolam makers and prevent the notion of a practice that typified a group. Each person is depicted by a portrait and a citation that conveys their particular relationship with kolam, in some cases intimate, in others more distanced. They are included in line with the agreement we made at the time of our initial encounters, and are therefore presented without names or specific place of belonging and the citation is not always the exact words of the person in the corresponding image. The individuals were arranged together in a pattern that resembled the symmetrical aesthetics of kolam designs. This montage was mounted under twelve mm Plexiglas and attached to the wall with black visible screws to enhance a sense of physicality and materiality of the two-­dimensional prints. The textiles were only attached at the top which caused them to move in relation to the weight of the work and the speed of the person passing, and they invited and allowed physical touch. At the time of the exhibition, the Museum of Ethnography had a particular space allotted for temporary shows. It was a wide white-walled corridor detached from, yet in coexistence with, the permanent displays and had mainly been used for documentary photography. The kolam exhibition was not made on site in direct relation to the archives, as the later artist-­in-residence Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyê˜ n used her art practice to investigate how colonial power relations were hidden in museum practices of collecting, archiving and displaying. Her critical assessment, presented in the exhibition Black Atlas in

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FIGURE 5.2

2016, can be linked to the works of Christian Boltanski who in the 1960s initiated an artist critique of the Western separation of objects from their original contexts and displayed in exotifying anthropological exhibitions (Schneider 2006a). The kolam-­based artworks instead pointed at the lack of attention to women and female practices in the current exhibitions which highlighted stories of white male heroic adventurers. The use of crafted textiles that has been part of a Nordic tradition of gender construction acted as a familiarizing tool which destabilized the visitor who expected representations exclusively concerned with the Western Other. The objects embodied an uncertainty which underlined the possibility of multiple interpretations of museum displays. The museum’s focus on cultural history constructed into the ethnographic present was further disrupted by the inclusion of kolam as a contemporary, shifting practice. In an attempt to engage with current geographical proximities, the museum hired a woman who belonged to the Tamil diaspora from Sri Lanka to make an inviting kolam at the opening night. However, she was not included in a collaborative sense and her performance became more of an ad hoc solution that rather confirmed the idea of exotic otherness. I placed a short questionnaire in the exhibition to assess the visitors’

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experiences and suggestions. It particularly addressed the combination of descriptive and artistic approaches, at the time unexpected at this museum, and if the exhibition could be understood as conveying knowledge. One visitor replied: ‘To see the art works enhances the emotional experience of what you describe. It also creates a link to one’s own context of being woman/women’s history/women’s work/art’. Another wrote that the display stimulated her to know more about kolam, while one did not understand the question. The varied answers point at the multiple interpretations visitors make based on their backgrounds and knowledge, but the low number of respondents prevented me from drawing further conclusions. The merging of South Indian and Nordic practices in the stitched kolams challenged the idea of authenticity and preservation in the museum and presented alternatives to notions of bounded cultures. Their fluid character was enhanced by their titles which I chose in reference to the places where I obtained the materials, such as: Norra Mellby – Perungattur; Bharathi Salai – Slaggatan; and Rue de Suez – Green Street. The kolam shapes and the Nordic laces and embroidery expanded into diasporic routes as I encountered plastic lace and sari materials in urban European neighbourhoods inhabited by migrants with backgrounds in North Africa and South Asia. The stitching, and subsequent gluing, of the kolam pieces placed the practice in a continuous process of investigating how femininity is constructed through various materials and forms of making in socially and culturally diverse settings. In the exhibition, kolam was presented as fluid and incomplete. Its shifting character embodied potentials for new questions and knowledge to emerge among the visitors. The transformations of kolam into textile, photography and video works can be understood as a form of appropriation. They are aligned with the hermeneutical dialogue proposed by Arnd Schneider where appropriation is expanded from the negative associations of theft into a process of cultural exchange and learning about others (2006a, 2006b, 2012). Schneider acknowledges violence committed by colonial powers in non-Western cultures where artefacts have been stolen and decontextualized in ethnographic museum displays, and the necessity among indigenous groups to reclaim ownership of their cultural heritage and request repatriations of stolen objects (Coombe 1998; Peers and Brown 2003). But in addition to these debates, Schneider illuminates how appropriation has been used in modern and postmodern Western art, and how artists related to diasporic and indigenous groups have developed practices of appropriation as meaningful ways to constitute their identities. Artists are described as sharing interests with anthropologists through their linked processes of appropriation where the former focuses on artefacts reshaped into artworks, and the latter on beliefs and practices subsequently transformed into texts. When these converging methods are conducted with respectful dialogical engagement conscious of

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ethics and power relations, they function as a creative technique for learning about and mediating between cultures (Schneider 2006a: 48). On a general level, appropriation is fundamental to social existence as groups and individuals interact and borrow from each other and thus foster change. Kolam, as any cultural practice, is positioned in these dynamic processes and at an increasing pace during the last thirty years as new materials and tools are invented and appropriated (Laine 2009) and as Tamils bring the practice into diasporic contexts (Laine 2012). In addition, the shapes are appropriated by designers and applied onto saris, bags and other consumer goods. From this perspective, my own appropriation follows ongoing transformations. But the exhibition differed in its intention to accomplish the mediation discussed by Schneider, and it was also a personal investigation founded in family history as well as artistic training where existing art works were appropriated and transformed through exercises termed ‘paraphrasing’ and ‘citing’. The continuation of the kolam exhibition called for a more popular and diverse environment. Swedish cities are segregated where the centres are inhabited by white middle class and people with migrant and refugee backgrounds are marginalized into suburban areas.The Museum of Ethnography is situated in the centre, and I wanted to engage my research with a wider audience. I approached the Blue Place,1 a municipality run cultural centre in the million-­programme area Angered northeast of Gothenburg. It focuses on socially engaged dialogues and events with an inclusive approach to the many national, religious and ethnic backgrounds in the area. Knowledge sharing is a significant activity and a citizen office provides training in Swedish, support on filling-in required application forms and matters related to the Swedish Migration Agency. The following year the kolam exhibition was presented in their art gallery amidst this vivid environment that also hosts a library, theatre, cinema, high school and restaurant. The kolam exhibition was finally presented at Brunei Gallery at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Their exhibitions are curated in relation to globally engaged research activities and the visitors are mainly constituted by scholars interested in art and artists directed towards research. This international academic context provided new expectations and ways of understanding the exhibition. My works were installed in the upstairs gallery and additionally framed by the coinciding larger show The Fabric of Fieldwork. It was a related attempt to combine artistic and academic ways of working and had taken shape as a collaboration between the artists and fashion scholar WESSIELING and the artist and anthropologist Susan Ossman. They presented paintings, sculptures and installations based on their ethnographic fieldwork in East Asia and North Africa respectively. Both of them were concerned with local constructions of femininity and possible visualizations of women’s work. Their exhibition was expanded by an international seminar where artists,

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anthropologists, and cultural critics discussed the contemporary interests at the intersection of academic research and artistic practices. I attended the seminar, which in turn brought wider attention to the kolam exhibition. In her review of the The Fabric of Fieldwork and the linked seminar, the artist-­ researcher Natalia Zagorska-Thomas traces difficulties in communication across the disciplines related to the lack of acknowledgement of artworks as valid outcomes of research among the academic scholars (2014). She suggests that collaboration between artists and the physical and natural sciences seems more productive than that between artists and scholars within the humanities and social sciences and she ascribes this notion to a need within the latter field, present at the seminar, to counteract criticisms by popular culture and the ‘hard sciences’ for lack of scientific rigour and therefore approach artists and artworks as subjects of study rather than research partners. While this might be the opinion of some, it is also possible that artists hold that associations with the ‘hard sciences’ are more prestigious and enhance their possibility to be publicly legitimized as researchers, as in the idealization of the Renaissance within artistic research described in the introduction of this book. The kolam exhibition was not site-­specific which enabled an investigative approach towards various contexts and how their particular kinds of expectations and aesthetic norms would affect the agency of and responses toward the descriptions and artworks. The three spaces were chosen according to their different audiences and an aim to disseminate insights about kolam and its context broadly, but an informed comparison between them and an evaluation of the exhibition’s potential as mediator of knowledge could not be accomplished due to my inability to be present during opening hours and talk to the visitors. Corinne Kratz, who organized a traveling exhibition of her photographic portraits of Okike people and communities, argues for the importance of visitors’ studies to trace the complex interrelations in museum displays and their wider social and political context (2002). She conducted a comparative study in two of the seven museums where her exhibition was shown and used various methods from surveys with coded answers to open discussions at the displays, people’s own recordings of their comments, and analysis of essays written by visiting students. The result elucidates the plurality of interpretations and understandings among the visitors, and Kratz emphasizes that beyond the practices of curators and designers they are affected and bounded by uneven politics of representation, ideas about stereotypes, and debates in media as well as academia. She calls for improved qualitative methods that investigate how visitors’ interpretations are constituted in order to advance the capacities of exhibitions to challenge and transform what we take for granted (ibid: 218). Like Kratz, I aimed to encourage dialogue and interaction across cultural differences. But while she developed her exhibition into a form of research to be further analysed, my

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work was mainly constructed as an alternative presentation of research at the time considered completed. Kratz’ open process, and my continued engagement with the kolam practice in the Tamil diaspora, can be related to the notion of prototyping as developed by George Marcus in his works on the blurred boundaries between art and anthropology (2013). A prototype is fluid and open to experimental revision, and Marcus suggests two types of prototyping as models to analyse contemporary complex spaces and interactions far beyond the classical endeavour where fieldwork experienced in distant places, often among colonial subjects, was transformed into authoritative conclusions inside detached academic worlds. Type 1 requires a disciplined mode of experimentation which generates a productive final form, while Type 2 defines a performative process of continuous reformulations in collaboration with the people involved in the research, who might share practices or be of higher social position than the anthropologist. Marcus connects Type 2 with the open practices of media labs, design schools and art collectives (2013: 401), and the unstable processes that shape the dynamic interactions and understandings of exhibitions in museums and galleries could be defined as this second form of prototyping. In Kratz case, the interaction with the exhibited photographs had been preceded by her taking the images back to the Okike for feedback and the comments were included in the exhibition texts, which in turn affected the visitors’ understanding. From the perspective of visual anthropology, this way of working builds on the ‘shared anthropology’ method developed by Jean Rouch in the 1950s where he brought his filmed material back to the West African protagonists for feedback, further incorporated their ideas of new film topics, and tried to establish filming situations where he and the protagonists performed in resonance with each other (Henley 2009: Ch 15).2 The models of prototyping and shared anthropology partly intersect with Ingold’s assessment of the transformational dynamics inherent in forward oriented processes of making among artists, but it does not address his emphasis on their relation to the sensory awareness of the maker and his or her embodied position in the physical environment. As suggested in the introduction, beholders of images and objects in an exhibition might also be able to perceive and learn from material traces of their coming into being, such as the sense of interactions with a camera when making portraits or cutting and stitching fabric into new forms which I aimed to address in the kolam exhibition. At the opening of the exhibition at Brunei, I reconnected with Hari Rajaledchumy. He became central in my research and collaborations with the Tamil diaspora and reappears in Chapter 7. The next chapter describes a workshop intervention in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, which took place at the same time as the kolam exhibition was planned and new textile pieces were in the making.

6 Artistic methods in urban South India

FIGURE 6.1

This is my future – my daughter has received a proper education and become a doctor. She can cure people and support her family. We are secured. ARUNADEVI 2009

A

runadevi’s presentation formed part of a series of five workshops that explored the potential of artistic methods in ethnographic fieldwork. The aim of this project was to investigate what kinds of knowledge could emerge

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in a setting which gave enhanced space to non-­verbal activities and where the sensory and discursive could be combined. The workshops were conducted in three neighbourhoods in Chennai and focused on themes that had proven relevant during the kolam research. Arunadevi realized the theme ‘future’ by arranging a scene at home with her three-­year-old daughter, where the girl performs the desired profession of a physician, dressed in her mother’s school uniform and taking the temperature of her doll placed on a cushion hospital bed. The act was documented with a single-­use camera provided for each workshop participant, and narrated at a group session.

Group formation and schedule The workshop series was limited by a timeframe of six weeks which required careful planning as well as building on already established trust. At the same time, there had to be space for shared authority where the research subjects could intervene. I re-­engaged my former assistant Kuladevy, and we developed a preliminary format for Autumn 2009. The plan was initially directed to people we had come to know during our collaboration three years earlier, and we first approached Nagammal, a well-­respected senior woman who had developed an individual strength that admitted certain challenges of conventions and expectations. We did not have a phone number but found each other as we searched and asked around in her crowded low caste neighbourhood close to the Karupakanniamman temple. During tea in her small house, we explained our plans to arrange a two-­hour workshop once a week with a group of women to further explore the conditions of their everyday lives. The first gathering would be an introduction that clarified my intentions, and as most of the inhabitants in Nagammal’s area lacked higher education and knowledge in English, Kuladevy was crucial for the endeavour. Photographic practices guided a large part of the sessions and would be introduced at the start. We suggested the themes ‘future’, ‘favoured place’, ‘self-­portrait’ and ‘memory’ to be visualized individually through a single-­use camera. Each camera was equipped with a film of thirty-­six exposures to cover the themes and allow for a few pictures of the participant’s own choice. Three weeks were allotted for the group members to work through the themes and we had planned two workshops in-­between this period. One would explore relationships with objects where we asked the participants to bring something cherished they were willing to share and talk about with the others. The following session would centre on creative activities beyond the household chores where each individual would present a form of crafting of their own choice. This would be the third workshop and also the suitable time to collect the cameras and bring the film rolls to a studio for development and prints. The fourth gathering

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would consist of each participant’s presentation of their themes and how they had chosen to realize them visually. I further aimed for a last session to evaluate the full intervention and where all those who took part would engage in co-­labour, a decision partly based on the experiences from the exhibition project in New Delhi where lack of transparency had caused misunderstandings. Nagammal enthusiastically picked up on our ideas and she had organized a group of six to meet with us in her house the next day. The intention was to make a comparative study and form three groups, differentiated by caste and class and consequently by neighbourhood. During my latest visit, I had made preliminary plans with a woman at the orthodox Brahmin area by the Parthasarathyswamy temple a few blocks away from Nagammal’s street. But she had moved to the suburbs and was less part of everyday conversations and whereabouts around the temple. Her daughter, who had made her large house available for group talks during my kolam research had married abroad. However, the woman continued to have a high position in the area and was able to appoint her previous neighbour Geetha as a group leader and instructed her to arrange a group for me. Geetha and the three additional women in this group were unfortunately people I had never met before and they were too busy to follow our schedule. It became difficult to interact on equal terms and to make comparisons between the groups as they developed in different ways, but as the participants provided further clues to relationships between people and things, they are included in this account. Geetha planned to take on the role of interpreting to English if necessary, and subsequently Kuladevy would not need to assist during the workshops of this group. Kuladevy arranged the third group through her personal network of friends, relatives and colleagues. Again, this became a setting where the participants were new acquaintances to me. But their close relationships with Kuladevy, and her decision to become an active member rather than an assistant in this particular group, provided keys to their trust and engagement. While the other groups mainly consisted of married women with children, Kuladevy had engaged women who lived in their parents’ house and were respectively engaged in studying or working. A senior colleague at the university where she was teaching became an exception. The colleague, Bhavani, showed curiosity when Kuladevy made photographs in their office for one of the workshop themes and asked if she could join the project. However, she had a high sense of integrity and wished to have one-­to-one sessions with me instead of sharing her experiences and points of view with a group, which Kuladevy and I, according to conventional politeness, only could agree to. The remaining four in this group gathered in Kuladevy’s home in Mylapore, a financially prosperous area mainly inhabited by upper middle class and high castes. Knowledge in English was common in this context and therefore Kuladevy only needed to interpret for one person.

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This chapter outlines how the workshops developed, from an initial focus on photographic practices expanded by drawing, embroidering, stitching, poetry writing, singing, cooking, and, inevitably, kolam-making. It shows how semi-­structured plans opened up towards improvization where each place and group was in flux. People were coming and going in relation to other responsibilities, affecting the situation by sometimes opening up and sometimes creating tensions. The planned timeframe of two hours was sometimes extended into a full day, and meals had to be prepared and eaten in-­between. There were always numerous images and other objects to look at and hold, and many stories to be told and listened to. The participants creatively transformed the workshops through various levels of collaboration, from taking part to co-­labouring following the differentiation between forms of involvement suggested by Schneider and Wright (2013: 11). However, I will use the term participants in this account to enable the readers’ own assessment of the related degrees of shared authority during the process. In conclusion, the chapter provides a critical analysis of how these collaborative gatherings, defined as methods based in art practice, can be used to enrich knowledge on social and material relationships. I will further address the impossibility of organizing a local exhibition of the materials presented at the workshops, which renders this project into a methodological inquiry unequipped to account for the potential of using art forms as presentations of research.

Emotional objects Chennai was in a state of regrowing its patches of mould when I arrived. It was slightly early for the monsoon, but each day came with short showers that kept the streets soggy and made brightly painted houses shift into dark green and grey. I had partly lost my sense of navigating the Triplicane and Mylapore areas, but walking at a slower pace made me reconnect with how houses and streets were linked together. But most people around me were very busy. The ongoing month of Ramadan created intense Muslim activities and sounds around the mosque in the area I lived, and the Tamil month Purattasi prompted enlarged pujas for the god Perumal in the Hindu communities. This further coincided with Navaratri, the nine nights of celebrating the Goddess and her powers in nine different forms. Particularly the latter event had an impact on how the workshops could be realized. Nagammal and her house provided an informal and supportive atmosphere for the first group. It was enhanced by the authority Nagammal held as an auspicious woman who had fulfilled her main duties in life, and she jokingly explained that in her case the duties had also included endurance of abuse.

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The only room, which was a living room during the day and a bedroom during the night and further accommodated a small shrine, acted as a safe space. Five women from the neighbourhood joined in, two were Nagammal’s daughters and the others her close friends and all except one were known to me since my previous fieldwork. Kuladevy outlined our plans at the first gathering, and in order to explain the idea of realizing themes she referred to how other themes had been used during their school days. The participants were encouraged to make their own interpretations of how the themes could be linked to personal life stories as well as larger narratives about wider concerns. Technical information about the cameras was necessary as the majority had never used a camera, but this was kept at a minimum in favour of their own experiments. I explained that our choice of analogue cameras was practical; the simplicity of making a huge number of images offered by digital cameras would make it more difficult to choose which ones to present in relation to the themes. At the same time, I opened up for other forms of image making. If somebody felt awkward with the camera, for example, drawing was proposed as a complementary technique to realise the themes. However, they were all keen on learning how to make photographs. The second session in Nagammal’s house became a very intimate and emotional event. The participants brought objects that were connected to strong experiences of love (anbu), longing, melancholy and loss, but also the excitement and worries of challenging boundaries. When we first explained the aim of this workshop, Priya stated that she was going to bring her son, as that which was most cherished in her life. When other participants argued that they were going to bring husbands, we agreed that no actual persons could be allowed. Instead, Priya brought a well-­thumbed notebook where she had written down the lyrics of almost fifty film songs. She explained how this habit started after she had got her first period and continued until she got married, a time when women are more restricted to the house: We feel lonely and the songs kept me company. Many other women also have this attachment to film songs. It is different for boys, they go outside and have a lot of friends to spend time with. The songs give me comfort, they release me from pain, they give me company and I feel relaxed when I sing. Now I have my children, they give me all that my relationship with the songs gave. The lyrics written down were chosen according to the kind of emotions the song evoked. Priya favoured family stories where melancholy incidents moved her to tears. When I asked how she could remember all the words, she explained how she used to play them on a cassette, stop and repeat until she got it right. They further merged into her by experiencing them through films

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during hours in front of the TV and a few visits to the cinema. The appearance of the little notebook at the workshop associated to a diary for another woman present, and Priya said that she sometimes wrote about her personal problems during the same life phase. But she stopped this practice as well: ‘Since my children’s birth, I do not need to. I convey my problems to God, I share them with God.’ Priya still listens to favoured songs, and sometimes sings, but she no longer actively collects them as lyrics in her notebook. Kuladevy agreed with the importance of film songs, but held that the kind Priya loves, ‘soft melody songs’, have grown out of fashion. Today people are more interested in a faster genre that evoke thrill and temptation. They were the ones more familiar to me, and later Kuladevy took me to a shop where we got two CDs with classical songs from the 1930s–90s for my education. There are restrictions on how strong emotions of love and desire can be visualized in Tamil films and the songs accompanied by dance scenes are arranged as fantasies of the protagonists rather than parts of the overall narrative (Dickey 1993). Consequently, the songs and dance scenes are saturated with dramatized emotions that, as in Priya’s case, provide a space where the inner turmoil necessary to control in public can be felt and expressed. Gomadhi’s presentation evoked notions of subversion. She had brought two gifts of love from her husband, a porcelain statue of the god Guberen and a wooden velakku lamp used in Hindu worship. But they were given before marriage, when boys and girls are not supposed to be explicitly in love. Although Gomadhi wanted to keep them, she was afraid to cause her family’s suspicion. She was able to hide the smaller lamp among her saris, but felt obliged to give back the larger statue. Gomadhi still feels embarrassed when she talks about the illicit passion which was mutual from the beginning: I kept the velakku hidden because our love had to be hidden. Otherwise I would have been beaten by my mother and my brother. We had to marry in secret. We went to a temple with some friends to marry. No family members where there. Then we also registered our marriage [so that it could not be formally annulled]. We could not go back to our homes so we stayed with friends. My mother scolded me very much when we she found out. She cried for a week. After some time, she accepted our love and marriage, as well as my mother-in-law, and then we could move back to our families. Gomadhi relived the strong love as she presented the objects she received twenty-­three years ago and told us about the struggle she and her husband fought together.

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Another form of love was expressed in Kuladevy’s group. The lecturer Sassi presented a finely embroidered sari given by her best friend Kumar at her latest birthday. It is unusual for a boy and a girl of marriageable age to be friends. But Sassi and Kumar lived in the same area and took the same bus every morning to the college where they both studied: ‘We always talked and our friendship grew during the bus rides. Then, I invited Kumar to my house, and I went to his. He is like a brother to me, and like a son in my house.’ No other relation would be possible. There have been some hints that could lead to disastrous gossip, but Sassi does not care and she is trusted by her mother. When Sassi begins to explain why she has not worn the sari yet, because ‘I save it for a special occasion’, the group turns into joint giggling. After a while, it becomes clear that this occasion is the wedding night, when the red sari obligatory at the official ceremony is taken off and the bride slips into another outfit in preparation for her first intimate encounter. Not even Kumar knows about her plans to incorporate his gift into her relationship with a future husband, but she intends to tell him after. I ask if they can continue their friendship then, or if her spouse might object. Sassi answers that: ‘I will tell about Kumar in advance, and if the man does not accept, I will not agree to marriage!’ She unfolds the sari to show us the exquisite embroidery and I sense intense emotions in her touch. It is as if the gift has been afforded the role of comforting mediator between friendship and sexual relations, or perhaps it enables a corporeal presence of the man she truly loves but cannot have. Priya, Gomadhi and Sassi express how Tamil women’s emotions relate to moral conventions, and to what extent objects and aesthetic experiences can

FIGURE 6.2

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act as negotiators. Women have a central role in upholding their family’s dignity, prestige and respectability, referred to as their gauravam. Chastity is the key ideal, and it is necessary to be a virgin at the time of marriage. The sexuality and procreation of young unmarried women is controlled through physical restrictions in public as well as the practice of arranged marriages. But a mother who acts in opposition to what is perceived as morally correct behaviour might also jeopardize the marriageability of her daughter. However, love evolves as an emotion that often defies the ideal, for example through the practice of ‘love marriage’ when a couple register their marriage against the will of their parents. The book with song lyrics, the velakku, the Guberen statue, and the sari points at how objects and the way they are handled, remembered and dreamed about come to embody strong feelings of love. Like the song and dance scenes in Tamil films, the objects provided a space infused with intense emotions outside of the ordinary. While Priya argued that she has her children now, her book was a source of comfort in her youth and continues to provide access to the feelings she had. Gomadhi seemed to long for the love that caused her passionate challenge of marriage rules, and the objects given by this love evoked cherished memories of capability. Sassi’s presentation offered a situation of becoming where the object was imagined almost as the skin of her desired but unattainable love. During each presentation, the cherished object was carefully handled in a way that seemed to intensify memories and emotions. As it was passed around to the group members, we were able to share the intimate feelings embodied in their materials and forms. The cherished object workshop can be related to Daniel Miller’s ethnographic investigation of individual households in an ordinary London street where he aimed to understand people’s everyday lives through their possessions (2009). Miller argues that people arrange their things to create order and harmony, an aesthetics of the household, which in turn provides a sense of comfort. The orders are formed by relationships between persons and things and continuously socialize persons within the household. The notion of order further holds arrangements that are contradictive, which bring us closer to the objects presented by Priya, Gomadhi and Sassi. Their chosen possessions embodied challenges to the moral order of expressing feelings and giving gifts, and contrary to the inhabitants of the London households, they did not have the space to construct their own aesthetics. Priya created a proxy for human relations through her engagements with film songs and her emotional expressions were embodied in the book of lyrics. Gomadhi and Sassi received gifts of love which disputed the prescribed arranged marriage, where transactions between the bride’s and the groom’s families follow a certain structure. Their gifts had to be kept as secrets and could be understood as embodiments of both love and disobedience.

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Artistic activities The definition of artistic activity, the subject of the third session, had been left open to the participants’ own interpretations. I imagined some kind of craft where engagements in materials and skills would evoke a sense of satisfaction. The choice of the term artistic was related to my interest in investigating the hierarchical boundary between art and craft, how it has been constructed in Europe and implemented in various contexts around the globe. Nagammal chose kolam-making and presented two elaborate designs from her sketch book. Her daughter Arunadevi had for the first time tried out a particular form of drawing where glittering colours were applied with brush and glue onto black velvet. Both women had incorporated animals and myths of gods and goddesses. The other participants in this group showed various forms of stitching, and they emphasized that their choices were related to opportunities to make money. Two women had taken courses that enabled them to earn an extra income by creating sari blouses, chudidars of tunics and trousers, and children’s dresses in their homes. Priya had worked in a leather factory before she got married and she presented a purse she had stitched for herself during lunch hours. Within this context of work, they still argued that there was considerable space to create their own designs. The participants in Kuladevy’s group did not connect their creative work with earnings which materialized their financially comfortable position. Sassi told us about her relationship with cooking which took us back to her close friend: ‘I really love to cook! It makes me happy even if I just make some snacks. But I don’t like to do it if I’m the only person eating, I want to do it for someone. I cook for Kumar every day.’ Her favourite dish was chicken, but as we met in Kuladevy’s strictly vegetarian house, she offered the dessert payyasam instead. Sujatha brought the more intangible practice of poetry, which was closely intertwined with her father. She studies his poetry in her Tamil literature courses at the university, and he encourages his daughter to write about issues that truly concern herself rather than those that might please an audience. Sujatha described how her relationship to nature often activated the writing process: I like the rain, I write a lot of poems when it rains. To write poems can also be a way to vent my anger. If I’m angry with my mother for scolding me, I might transpose it into anger about the atrocities of society in a poem. I don’t express explicitly the reason for my feelings, I transpose it into something else. Sujatha’s poetry writing overlaps with the sense of comfort Priya described when she showed us the notebook with film song lyrics during the object

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session in Nagammal’s house. But while Sujatha’s work brought her outside to competitions and university studies, Priya’s provided an imagined outside at a period in her life when her movements were restricted. The notion of emotional embodiment in objects grew in my understanding during the sessions on artistic activities. Without my knowledge, Kuladevy had suggested that the participants should present the example of their work as a gift to me. In addition to having solid things put into my hands, this further meant eating the payyasam Sassi served, and listening to Sujatha reading her poetry. Their willingness to share brought us closer together, but at the same time increased the pressure of how to reciprocate. The plans for my own engagement in artistic practices during the workshop series had been vague. I had brought a small video camera, and the session where the participants presented their creative making and resulting objects evolved as visually interesting to record. In this way, we would all be involved in artistic practices of our own choice. I decided to try with Nagammal’s group first as they knew me better, and although the present women only knew me as using a still camera there were no objections to the recordings and all of them remained relaxed. My intervention shaped the session to suit the result I had in mind. As I needed an initial understanding of the participants’ aims and choices in order to focus my attention on the most suitable manner of recording, we started with a short presentation by each person which Kuladevy translated to me. During the following recording, the presenter was invited to narrate and gesture more details. Kuladevy sometimes encouraged their enactment by asking questions, but we had decided that she should not interrupt by translating to me at that point to enable a flowing performance. Finally, we looked at the recorded material together with the group members to enable comments and criticism. Kuladevy and I completed full transcriptions of their recorded stories the next day, and I kept pondering on how to use the footage. I was not interested in making an audiovisual piece that only consisted of these strictly documentary recordings, but had various notions about how it could be combined with other materials. Although the women were great at conveying their relationships with their practices and objects in front of the camera, the short timeframe for the project made me refrain from recording during the rest of the sessions. The gatherings needed my full attention without having to think about suitable compositions that would translate the proceedings into useful imagery. The members in all the groups instead agreed that the photographs they had made could be used in my future presentations of the workshops.1 In between, I went to Karupakanniamman temple street and recorded a few times. Nagammal and her neighbours were keen to collaborate and make arrangements that would ensure good outcomes, which connect to their way of addressing the photographic themes.

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Performing photographic themes A striking feature of how the participants realized the given photographic themes was their creative engagement in performance, as shown in the introduction of this chapter. During the evaluation session, Arunadevi told us that this photograph where she had staged her daughter as her imagined future was the favourite among all the pictures she had made. She was pleased that she managed to arrange it and make the image affect the others in the way she aimed. The theme self-­portrait emerged as a collaborative exploration of gender identity within Nagammal’s group. When the visual realizations of the themes were presented, the young member Mahalakshmi presented a photo of herself dressed in what is considered to be an outfit for men. She proclaimed: ‘I’ve always desired to know how it would feel to wear jeans and a t-­shirt! The self-­portrait theme and the availability of a camera provided an opportunity to try.’ Together with Arunadevi and a friend outside the group, she had borrowed clothes from male relatives and playfully donned them in Nagammal’s house. They expanded the sense of loosening up their female neatness by letting their long hair down. The decision to realise the idea was inspired by an old photograph of Nagammal who once went to a studio with her closest girlfriends and dressed in men’s attire of white shirts and dark pants against an office backdrop. Kuladevy, accustomed to closer monitoring on women’s movements, was puzzled. Nagammal explained: We did this for fun. We did other things as well, I had a photo when I was sitting on a motorcycle, a friend took it, but that photo is gone now. When this photo [with the men’s attire] was taken, I was pregnant for the first time, it was the third month and I was vomiting a lot. It was difficult to make my mind up if I would participate or not, but I really wanted to go so I did . . . It was hanging on the wall in our house, and all the other girls have their own in their homes. Kuladevy asked if the in-­laws did not complain about her going out of the house after marriage like this. Nagammal just answered ‘no’ and gave us that particular smile which expressed both mischievousness and experiences of deep pain. Their dialogue confirms Karin Kapadia’s study of low caste Tamil women which demonstrates that they have more autonomy than girls and women within higher castes (1996). The transgender images made in Nagammal’s group stand in stark contrast to the main photographic representations of women, astonishingly decorated as embodiments of auspiciousness at the celebrations of their first periods and weddings and compiled into large albums or DVDs. Their enactment points at a particular determination also within their caste belonging.

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FIGURE 6.3

Indian practices of portrait photography have been studied by Christopher Pinney (1997). By a combination of historic and ethnographic perspectives, he shows how photographic works are embedded in wider cultural practice and shift across time and locality. Pinney describes how contemporary popular portraiture making in studio settings merge real life with dreams through the use of gesture, costume, props, and backdrops of revered deities and places. People wish to come out as stunning as possible, and it is common that the photographer elevates the portrayed by double exposures and montages. The studio setting is ‘a space in which to stage idealized versions of oneself’ and the images are ‘concerned with the transcendence and parody of social roles’ (Pinney 1997: 178). The reassuring environment of Nagammal’s house made it into an excellent stage where the group members could experiment with their identities, in front of as well as behind the camera. Outside of this environment, the making and showing of photographs required adjustments. In the case of their respective transgendered portraits, Nagammal and Mahalakshmi had different points of view. Nagammal, who was respected and appreciated, kept it on the wall at home and was happy to tell her story to any visitor. Mahalakshmi who was in her late teens, soon available on the marriage market and therefore needing to be careful about how she was perceived by others, was more cautious. Her father had already scolded her about her photographic play and warned her about serious consequences. People might start to gossip and question her female capacities. She does not mind that I convey her choice of costumed performance to others, as long as nobody sees the picture and can identify her. The theme of ‘favoured place’ further elucidated the issue of proper behaviour in public space and the possibility to negotiate or challenge without

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FIGURE 6.4

damaging the family gauravam. In a very direct way and across the three groups, many participants conveyed the impossibility for women to make photographs in streets and other public places. Women should be on the way from one place to another, and this cannot be interrupted by figuring out the best angle for a photograph. That would just have been too embarrassing. The fact that women photographers were unheard of increased the sense of awkwardness and brought forth comparisons with the activities of tourists. But instead of giving up this theme, the participants invented ways of making pictures beyond the conventional method of standing still in front of a place. Priya solved the issue by asking a nephew to make the pictures for her, but she always made sure that the boy paid attention to how she wanted them to come out. The Karupakanniamman temple was one of the favoured places for all women in Nagammal’s group, and the same boy was asked to use two more cameras during their local Navaratri festival. Priya argued that she would have been ‘tortured’ by the neighbours if she had made the pictures herself, and refers to the physical pain that can be experienced by people’s teasing. Nagammal agreed and talked in an excusing manner about the ‘rudeness’ of their neighbourhood. One theme that Priya added to the original four was things she does not like. Here she arranged for the boy to make a picture of a group of women playing dhayyam, a dice game, in her street. When I asked why she objected to their game Priya developed further on the gauravam morality regarding women’s public behaviour: ‘They play with money, this is bad. They are shouting and laughing loudly and fighting in the middle of the road . . . It is not good, and others might get tempted to join in.’ I asked who these women were as they had time to sit and play. ‘They are mainly older women, they

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have less responsibilities and more free time. But some are younger, women that join the play instead of sleeping after lunch [which would give you more energy for proper work].’ Through another photograph, arranged with the help of the same boy, Priya showed what she regards as a good woman. This was a portrait of a hard-­working widow who makes ends meet by cooking the local food idly and vadai in her house and selling it to passers-­by. Priya’s ideas on what is appropriate for women in relation to men caused disagreements and anger when she applied them on her ‘future’ theme, and voiced what the others perceived as discriminating against her daughter in favour of her son. She presented a photo of them both, and explained that she hopes that her son will get a good job through the higher education they will provide and that her daughter will get a good marriage. When the other participants realized that this daughter will be deprived of higher education because she is not considered to be a remaining asset to invest in, they scolded Priya loudly. Kuladevy and her students were used as a counter argument: ‘Her students already manage to work at their father’s companies, and they will continue after marriage! How can you degrade your girl child like this!’ In an almost whispering voice, Priya explained her relation to the logic of the marriage market: ‘A girl with a high education should marry a man on an equal or higher level to be happy. But such a man will ask for a high dowry. In the future when we look for a husband, it will be difficult as we can’t give so much.’ In the end, she argued that she will spend the same amount of money on both children, as education for the boy and as dowry for the daughter. The majority of the participants in the other two groups could afford to send daughters as well as sons to education, but they had incorporated the morality which questioned women as photographers in public space. One solution was to visit semi-­public places, for example a former school yard in order to visualize the memory theme, and these familiar grounds usually did not create a sense of embarrassment. In Bhavani’s case, the public image making coincided with the future theme. She visualized her aim to conduct doctoral research at the Institute of Technology with a photograph made through her car window when she was passing on her way to work at her present university. She made a swift gesture with her camera during a red traffic light, but she described that she had not been quick enough and people started honking from behind. ‘This was embarrassing too. But I think men feel embarrassed in a similar way, maybe when you don’t master the practice, you don’t want to reveal that to others.’ This would mean that they risked being perceived as lacking self-­control, the same undesirable character that proper feminine performance is supposed to counteract. Holiday trips were a possibility among the women in Geetha’s group and they showed me albums with photographs taken by male family members during visits at the hill stations Ooty and Kodaikanal.

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There were participants in each group who defied moral conventions and made several photographs in public. One confident woman in Kuladevy’s group had already been moving around with her own digital camera. She used this familiar tool instead of the one-­time kinds I provided, and presented photos from a recent trip to her home village as well as from public places in Chennai. Arunadevi made a picture of her house, and told us about the sense of independence she felt when she was able to leave her mother’s house and start a new household with her husband. Perhaps this place could be referred to as semi-­public due to the familiarity of one’s own street, but at the same time this is one of the places where people make inquiries when it is time for your children to get married. However, Arunadevi continued to express independence through making photos in public, at the beach as she argued that ‘everybody takes pictures there’ and of the Parthasarathyswamy temple situated at the centre of the neighbourhood of Geetha’s group. She explained: ‘I was slightly shy, and afraid that people would be looking at me. I was there in the morning and not many were around, and I thought I would be paid a lot of attention. But no one really did, so I was ok. Before I thought it would be easier if there were many people, that I would not have stood out.’ In spite of the strict practices among people living in Geetha’s area, one young participant who had studied abroad arranged several pictures in public, but she was always in front of the camera and a male friend stand behind. However, this group had very little time to engage in photographic practices as they were almost completely immersed in the kolu arrangements of Navaratri.

The paramount kolu practices The women in Geetha’s group lived in the vicinity of the Parthasarathyswamy temple and belong to orthodox Brahmin communities. It is considered mandatory in their households that women and girls create a kolu, a decorative display of dolls related to Hindu mythology arranged on a row of steps, during the celebrations of Navaratri. The kolu is a centre piece as friends and relatives come to visit each other during the nine-­day festival. As with the kolam, the visualization of the kolu is identified with the character of its maker. A beautiful and well-­organized kolu means that the woman is morally impeccable and takes great care of her husband, family and home. The prestige at stake takes the form of informal competitions between households, and the particularly skilled sign up for contests arranged by institutions and companies.2 My workshop suggestions disturbed women’s kolu planning, and Kuladevy had to intervene and clarify my point in Tamil. Through a combination of curiosity and politeness, Geetha and the three other women in her group invented ways to combine both tasks.

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FIGURE 6.5

This is my self-­portrait, my kolu of the stories from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, about our way of life, it is me. GEETHA 2009 The kolu was used as a realization of the self-­portrait theme, and it became the focus of the cherished object workshop. Although we did not have time for a session of artistic activities, the kolu-making presented itself as a convincing fulfilment of this aspect. One of the temporary participants in the group articulated what for her was a clear connection between the aims of the kolu and my artistic methods: The kolu displays are about learning. The main reason to make them is to teach the children about our different gods and goddesses. The adults tell stories about the deities, from Ramayana and Mahabharata, and when the children see the scenes at the same time, they learn better. It is like your work, it is about the visual and the words. When the children see Rama on the step and hear a story about him, they remember more.

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Geetha’s group combined the visual with words by inventing essay writing as an additional method to work through the themes I had given. The historically high position of Brahmins in Indian society has largely been based on their knowledge of ancient scriptures and writing skills, and the addition of essays can be understood as an articulation of their sense of belonging. Their kolumaking, as well as their essays, expressed a large concern with upholding traditions and performing one’s responsibilities. One of them wrote: ‘It is the utmost duty of every Indian woman to keep her family happy and enjoy every part of her life with her kith and kin.’ In the kolu arrangements, this was worked through by creating perfect miniature scenes of marriage and other family functions. The participants’ devotion and faith in the deities’ capacities to help them perform their duties correctly was expressed through the scenes from the epic stories mentioned above. The religious content overlapped with history in a kolu exhibit of the ‘development of civilizations’ beginning with dolls in caves and ending with city life with tall buildings, and one with social duties through scenes from hospitals and schools. The latter kolu was related to the concern with charity and welfare articulated in one of the essays: I am very much focused on doing service to the society. I want to dedicate my future on doing service namely helping outstanding students who are economically backward. Creating awareness about diseases like cancer by giving counselling to the people of rural areas who are unaware about this deadly disease and its symptoms. At the same time as charity is promoted, these participants expressed the future theme through photographs of new cars and larger houses, unimaginable a few streets away in Nagammal’s ‘economically backward’ neighbourhood. During my earlier fieldwork in the Brahmin area, the longer timeframe allowed for a familiarity that moved beyond the need to always be correct and polite. In spite of the current limitation, interactions with Geetha’s group illuminated the importance of objects in reproductions of social relationships and Hindu Brahmin values during their Navaratri celebrations. Following Miller, the kolu arrangement is an example of how objects are used to create an ordering aesthetics central to notions of comfort and processes of socialization. While Nagammal and Kuladevy’s groups enjoyed public kolus when they visited temples as well as presented objects that challenged conventions, the aesthetic and moral order was more tangible among the members of Geetha’s group. Making, seeing and talking about the kolu display conveyed a heightened emphasis of the importance of adhering to Hindu scriptures, historically transferred among Brahmins and upheld by their orthodox members.3

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Public presentation During the planning stages of the workshops, I imagined various possibilities to present an exhibition of our collaborative practices and the resulting photographs before I left Chennai. I did not want to impose the art scene and its requirements of professional qualifications onto people unfamiliar with its hierarchical and market oriented objectives. At the same time, I perceived a public presentation as a possible act of empowerment if the voices and visual works of women with low social status could be allowed space in a well-­established gallery environment. Halfway into the workshops, we presented the idea in Nagammal’s group. None of the participants had been to an art space, but Kuladevy used the model of school exhibitions to explain what I had in mind. These are annual occasions where students visualize themes through objects and images as part of their learning process, and the final works are displayed to family members. Two women answered yes immediately, and I asked for a joint response during our last meeting. At that point, all of them were keen to participate. Nagammal suggested that we should include their cherished objects in the exhibition and the other women agreed to this. In her case this was a stuffed fawn. It had accidentally been left behind in an auto-­rickshaw, and the driver did not know how to contact the passenger. When he instead gave the object to Nagammal, she felt uncertain about keeping something that did not belong to either of them. But the little deer became the reason for many curious visitors in her house and she argued that it could have a similar effect in a public exhibition. The women in Kuladevy’s group were familiar with exhibitions in galleries and museums and supported the idea as well. In the case of Geetha’s group, the commitment to the workshops had been limited in comparison with the other two, and it did not seem plausible to involve them in a mutual exhibition. The majority of the participants’ presentations consisted of material objects that could be installed in a fairly traditional way, and this could be accompanied by performances of Sujatha’s poetry reading and Sassi’s payyasam cooking. The latter elements would engender a situation where the audience participated in the creation of the artwork, at first possible to frame through Nicolas Bourriaud’s definition of relational aesthetics where art works are evaluated by their capacity to produce intersubjectivity which he exemplifies by Rikrit Tiravanija’s sharing of food in a gallery space (2002). However, the Chennai setting provides a context where caste hierarchies prevent people from consuming items that have been touched by members of groups lower than their own. An intervention where food is shared could be understood as too politically challenging and therefore cause friction rather than relationality. Tamil poetry on the other hand is highly valued across castes and would have a higher potential of bringing people together. Claire Bishop’s

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proposal of relational antagonism where political tensions and violence are exposed through reiteration (2004) was thus continuously discarded. But, as discussed in Chapter  3, her critical approach towards only focusing on conviviality and the shared in collaborative art was relevant to carry further. The kolam fieldwork had included certain inquiries on the art scene in Chennai, and the positive response from the workshop participants led to new visits. There were less than a handful of art galleries, and they focused on sculpture and painting where Tamil and Indian artists explored ways of challenging and intersecting with colonial impositions of Victorian ideals and later traditions of modernism. I found no space for the contemporary ideas on socially and politically engaged art that motivated our workshops. Instead, I approached a non-­profit organization which marketed itself as concerned with broader issues of cultural relations and arranges public events such as concerts and film festivals. Kuladevy and I were invited to discuss the details, but the representative we met refused to present works of people who could not show a record that proved ‘high aesthetic standards’. It became clear that they preferred to maintain an audience of ‘refined’ cultural habits where people of low caste had to be excluded.4 An issue we agreed on was not necessary to share with the concerned women. We made another try at the college where Kuladevy worked, but they argued that they were too busy with their annual theatre festival. The fieldwork timeframe ran out and, although there had been no definite plan to curate an exhibition, the discriminating reasons for excluding the workshop participants made me leave with a sense of frustration and incompleteness. Later, back in Sweden, an artist friend asked me why we did not hold an event in the local temple or street where the participants lived. This reminded me of how much I have become formed by anthropological training in ethics where local norms and practices are to be investigated and understood rather than challenged. There had never been an exhibition in that place and it was not for me to suggest. The workshops engaged intimate aspects of the participants’ everyday lives and a public intervention in their own neighbourhood could put their respectability at risk.

Collaborative assessment Long-­term fieldwork permits the researcher to reflect on his or her interventions and how to proceed in order to develop practices of exchange and establish suitable rapport that can lead the project further. Shorter projects demand faster results where central questions might be overlooked. In order to make the workshop investigations as transparent as possible, I asked the participants to share their critical assessments in a last group discussion. This could be

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realized in Nagammal’s group while the members of the other groups gave their evaluations individually or in writing. Overall, they perceived the workshop intervention as a legitimate opportunity to reflect upon themselves in a way that their daily chores did not permit, and they enjoyed the challenge of how to realize their thoughts, memories and feelings visually. For those who had had a challenging approach with their cameras, the events became an invitation to continue using their new photographic skills. Arunadevi  I thought a lot before making each image, especially the self-­ portraits. It was difficult to figure out what kind of pictures I could make of myself. Priya  I got a lot of ideas about how to make the self-­portrait. The problem was to choose which ones to make. Sujatha  It’s the first time I’m telling about myself in this way. I liked how the themes made me think about my childhood. I reflected much more during photographing than I’ve done before, I liked that. I got more selective than usual. This has been exciting and interesting. Geetha  You made us explore ourselves, we enjoyed this! It’s the first time I have made a picture of myself without any relatives or friends. The participants’ engagement in the objects and themes also brought forth painful memories and issues they previously had considered better to put behind them. This became most clear in the case of Kuladevy’s colleague Bhavani: I thought that it would be exciting at first, to go around and take pictures. But it proved to be difficult, an emotionally intense exercise, and a mind exercise. Because of my daily chores I do not have time for this thinking, about myself. It has been emotionally exhausting, it has been both painful and pleasurable, I didn’t expect this. Many memories started coming back, things I had forgotten or perhaps put behind me. This exposure to my memories extended during our talk, my explaining to you made it more difficult. But Kuladevy told me about the large engagement among the poor women [in Nagammal’s group] and I felt I couldn’t give up. This has been like a catharsis for me. As Bhanavi and I met one-­to-one, she allowed herself to be open and reflective in a sense that was difficult within the groups. She further commented on consolations in her life that had surfaced during the workshops, such as the relationship with her maid:

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She is my life line, she gives my life a sense of purpose. I cannot imagine a life without her! She is always in our house, since seven years back. Even if I give her holidays she doesn’t want to be with her parents, they both drink and suggest that she should sell her body to earn more. We share difficulties, she is always supporting . . . In life, you learn how to respond to difficulties and hindrances, and to turn them into your advantage, or to work your way around them so that you get what you want in the end. Kuladevy’s comments further demonstrate the high level of intervention within the workshop venture, which can be understood as defining this method as artistic in comparison with conventional fieldwork: I was visualising a diary in my mind before I started to use the camera. The work has left a big impact. It was strong and overwhelming to travel backwards in this way. It was like reliving twenty-­five years in three weeks. If I didn’t have my ordinary full-­time job, I would have pondered more on which pictures to make, then I would have enjoyed it more . . . I enjoyed reliving my past. I learned that I’m sometimes egoistic, that I want to do things by myself. Kuladevy preferred the cherished object session which she argued had touched deeper feelings within all the participants in both her and Nagammal’s group. It was suggested that I would have understood better if I had arranged private sessions instead of group talks for this, then they would have felt less shy and described more. But I explained that I also learned from this, to what extent and about what they felt comfortable with sharing. When Kuladevy and I talked about how it was possible for her friends to share their objects and stories with me, she reiterated what often resurfaces in ethnographic fieldwork: ‘the participants had trust in you because you are at the same time close enough and distanced enough. And they feel that they share their intimate lives for a good purpose, that the research is valuable.’ In a text message sent later that night Kuladevy added: ‘We wouldn’t have had trust, been so comfortable or confided so much to a man! Gender matters the most!’

People, images and things The workshop series provoked the participants to reflect on their sense of self, and their relations to things, places, and people around them. The realizations of the themes are embedded in Tamil Indian notions of personhood which have been discussed extensively within anthropology. They were instigated by the ethnosociological studies of McKim Marriott, who suggested

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that Indian persons should be comprehended as fluid and divisible entities in constant exchange with their environment and he uses the term ‘dividual’ to elucidate difference in relation to Western understandings of the bounded individual (Marriott 1976). Persons, things, places and relationships are involved in various forms of transactions, where substances are exchanged according to moral codes which in turn can be modified by action. What one does needs to be adjusted in relation to what, where and with whom one is situated, and actions performed by other entities affects one’s own being through the transmission and absorption of substances. The individual and notions of personhood have been further discussed in seminal works on Indian society by Marriott and Ronald Inden (1977), Luis Dumont (1970), Valentine Daniels (1984) and Margaret Trawick (1990). According to Mattison Mines, their various accounts are similar in their subordination of the individual in favour of the group and have hereby constructed the Indian person as an exotic antithesis of the Western subject (1994). Mines instead argues that individuality is central to how Tamil Indians understand themselves – within groups such as household, kin, caste, neighbourhood or public institution, each person is valued and ranked according to individual achievement and agency. While the majority of the above accounts have focused on the male individual in relation to caste, Busby has investigated substance and transaction in relation to gender construction (2000; see further Chapter  3 and Laine 2009). She contends that a person’s gender is regarded as a fixed attribute, but exchanges of substances in daily performances can both reinforce and undermine the perception of a person and, importantly, his or her procreative capacities (Busby 2000: 21). To interact with what is considered as male clothing, as Mahalakshmi did in her realization of the self-­portrait theme, could thus be seen as threatening the female ability to give birth. Marriott was influenced by Marcel Mauss’ account of the relationship between persons and things in Maori gift exchange where the gift was considered to be imbued with parts of its giver (1990). The notion of the dividual and distributed person was taken up by Marilyn Strathern in her analysis of Melanesian personhood and gift giving (1988) and further developed by Alfred Gell in his conceptualization of how parts of a person’s agency is transferred to art objects (1998). Gell proposes a theory of art that makes a general claim of the distribution of personhood to images and things rather than specify its application in particular cultural contexts (ibid; Thomas 2001). This makes it possible to revisit the idea of the dividual in the Tamil setting without losing sight of the individual and understandings of a fixed core which lacks in Marriott’s analysis. The participants in the workshops evoked notions of divisibility as well as individuality. Bhavani realized the self-­portrait theme by making a photograph of her maid, which in turn made her reflect on how close their relationship

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actually was. Priya presented a picture made in her kitchen, where she attends to the cooking and her husband and son are in focus by looking straight at us. Both workshop members visualized their person as shared with others. Geetha identified with her kolu and described how women in her neighbourhood are valued by their individual capacity to make neat and beautiful arrangements of Hindu myths and moral orders. Her person is thus shared with material objects, but she is at the same time evaluated as an individual within a group. The sense of individuality was further expressed in images and discussions about particular women’s capacity or failure to uphold respectability and gauravam within their families. Kuladevy’s reference to being egoistic when she enjoyed doing things by herself during the workshops articulates that women should not pay too much attention to their individual selves and hereby risk the well-­being of their family members. The two gifts of love presented at the cherished object session appear as distinct examples of an embodied presence of the giver, and according to Mauss it is this giving away of oneself that makes the act require reciprocity and the following exchanges establish solidarities and obligations (1990). But the velakku and Guberen statue given to Gomadhi by her future husband and the sari presented to Sassi by her close male friend did not follow Tamil agreements of appropriate transactions between families and future kin. The gifts and the social interaction between the women and men defied conventional morality. However, it is unclear whether Gomadhi’s acceptance of the velakku made her feel obliged to marry her lover and openly confront her mother. In Sassi’s case, she seemed to have reconciled with the necessity of another marriage partner arranged by her parents, but her exchanges with Kumar were ongoing and ambiguous at the time of the workshops. In both cases, the women’s handling and telling of the objects revealed desire and longing grounded in a sense of individual choice.5 Gell’s focus on art objects collapses the separation between image and object, and his emphasis on the effect of their agency questions semiotic conceptualizations of images as representations of the absent. In the context of photography, Edwards argues that visual content merges with physical properties as two ontological layers and the meaning of photographs is constituted in the dialogue between them (Edwards 1999).6 The workshop series pointed towards this integrated perspective as the cherished object gathering in Nagammal’s group spontaneously developed into an investigation of photography in her house. When all the participants had completed their object presentations, pictures arranged in albums and displayed in frames on the wall were passed around and discussed. Then Nagammal brought out a plastic bag full of photographs which she emptied into a large pile in the middle of where we sat on the floor. She told: ‘They all hold emotions connected to special life events.’ This archive was a cherished object as well

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and the photographs it contained embodied memories and emotions central to Nagammal’s life. The unravelling of the archive relates to Edwards’s analysis of photographs as bearers of stories (2006). She suggests that photographs’ capacities to evoke memories, in combination with their collective handling and viewing within a group, creates a presence that directs articulations of history beyond image content and the visual sense. Embodied engagements where past and present relations are revisited and expressed among the participants show that photographs can be intimately connected also to touch and sound. When the photographs and stories are performed and shared within a group, previous relationships can be reinforced or shifted. At the end of the workshop series, Nagammal added the realizations of the photographic themes to her archive and potentially enabled them to affect her social network through future multisensory story telling. The Chennai workshops became a productive tool through which relationships were remembered, reimagined and rearticulated among the group members. Photographic practices and the sharing of the results and other selected meaningful objects provided an unconventional space where private stories and new experiments were exchanged. Individual and collective performances were debated, and evoked both playful and austere responses engaging emotions of enjoyment and pleasure as well as embarrassment and pain. Although I felt a sense of incompleteness when we could not accomplish the exhibition, the workshops invited imagination and creative thinking and provided knowledge about the role of images, things and places in constitutions of selves and social relationships. As a methodological intervention, it had a large impact on how collaborative and participatory artistic methods developed during my research with the Tamil diaspora in the UK. The next chapter describes the first sections of this work.

7 ‘Making kolams in London’: A collaborative and participatory art event

The atmosphere was infused with excitement when Rita finally announced that it was time to begin to draw. After months of planning, members from the Tamil diaspora had gathered in a suburban shopping centre outside London to engage in a collaborative and participatory public action. The morning had been busy with preparations; putting up the two party-­tents facing the lane between the main shopping street and the mall; hanging pictures inside the tents that had been drawn during the preparatory workshop at the local Tamil refugee centre; cleaning the ground with brooms aided by heavy rain; allocating the white rice flour to draw with into small bowls and mixing some portions with coloured powder. By midday, the sky had cleared. Nine women and girls took up a bowl in their left hand, filled the space between their thumb and first fingers on their right hand with rice flour, and started to draw dots and lines on the ground. Their rhythmical movements slowly evolved into kolam designs, made daily in front of the house by Tamil women in India and Sri Lanka to increase well-­ being and auspiciousness, but rarely seen in the British environment. Rita was considered the local expert and she took the lead under one tent. Her guidance in engagement with the eagerness of the main participants created white structures and coloured fields that soon floated outside the tent and across the street. The actions under the second tent were initiated by Hari, an artist who set out to challenge the boundaries of the kolam practice, particularly its gendered aspects. His approach spurred various explorative forms that incorporated memories of fear and violence experienced during the civil war in Sri Lanka. People passing by on their shopping routes were invited to join in the drawing. Some took the time to

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look, others started dialogues, and shortly the number of the drawing participants also increased. When the afternoon came to a close, the intervention had momentarily transformed the commercially driven environment into a playful collaborative investigation of shared space and belonging.

T

he event ‘Making kolams in London’ was performed in Hounslow during August 2012, and embedded in my research project on artistic practices in the Tamil diaspora. It was formed in relation to an absence, based on the transformation of kolam from being drawn daily in public by Tamil women in South Asia to an indoor practice in the UK. The initial idea was articulated at the Tamil Community Centre (TCC), the local support hub for refugees and asylum seekers, and collaboratively organized by their main coordinator Rani Nagulendran, the kolam expert Rita Gnaniah, the artist Hari Rajaledchumy and myself. We wanted to make claims through the performance, stretching from challenging the kolam absence, losses of memories and skills, notions of compulsory Tamil femininity, the numbness of commercialized space, the orientalizing effect of white presence, the protocol of acknowledged research methods, and risks of unethical outcomes of collaborative and participatory art projects. During months of planning and negotiation, our various perspectives and motivations mingled with anxieties of increased frictions and probabilities of losing the sense of current belonging. As part of my research, the kolam event was simultaneously a method to investigate Tamil existence in an environment defined by British aesthetics and morality. It combined the aim to enhance the situation of socially impoverished groups emphasized within socially and politically engaged art projects with explorations of how knowledge can be produced through shared practice articulated by phenomenologically informed anthropology. It was shaped with close attention to the critical risks of these projects, discussed as a lack of attention to power relations and ethical sensibilities which enables a reproduction of the relations the artist aims to challenge and a situation foremost concerned with the artist’s individual fame (Kester 2011; Kwon 2002; Sansi 2015; Schneider and Wright 2013). It henceforth becomes useful to incorporate anthropology’s long-­term experience of self-­reflexive investigations of the researcher’s position in relation research subjects, and its method of gaining an inside perspective through extended fieldwork across various social and cultural fields, to avoid these risks and further include culturally relative meanings and consider local effects of global economic differences (Sansi 2015; Schneider and Wright 2013). This chapter describes the kolam event and discusses its collaborative and participatory aspects in relation to Arnd Schneider’s and Chris Wright’s call for a differentiation between the two terms to better evaluate degrees of

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involvement and conceptions of agency in these kind of artworks (2013: 11). Does the sense of shared authorship associated with the term collaboration emerge in the kolam setting? Or does the intervention merely reproduce the environment it aims to alter? Can the participants be understood as co-­producers or are they mainly manufacturers of the artist’s/researcher’s ideas and fame? While much of the current discussions centre on power relations between an individual and a community as a singularity, the aim of this text is to expand the framework by the inclusion of hierarchies within the addressed community and plural ways of connecting with the environment. It will further introduce Grant Kester’s perspective of what the term collaborative art entails (2011). The first section of the chapter accounts for how the kolam event took shape during a transitional period of my research practices, which in turn affected the event. It was a decisive shift from South India as a region and a way of being towards Tamil diasporic existence, and towards an explicit engagement in art practice and the academic discipline artistic research. This part is followed by a description of how the idea of the kolam event emerged during a preliminary study in 2011 and became renegotiated within a shifted context and research agenda. The actual intervention is illuminated by two frameworks; the public environment formed by notions of ethnic and racial boundaries, and the academic setting imbued with ideas of autonomous disciplines. The latter is further described by an extension of the kolam action performed at the University of Westminster. It is suggested that a transdisciplinary approach that looks beyond both artistic and anthropological boundaries and instead focuses on the research question provides a gratifying perspective.

Transition between research fields The diaspora emerged as an expansion of my work in relation to events in South Asia as well as in London. Firstly, the hazardous situation of the Tamils in Sri Lanka provoked an awareness of the magnitude of their flight following the brutal Sinhalese oppression. This came to my knowledge during a visit in Chennai in February 2009, three months before the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were defeated by the Sri Lankan military after 30 years of civil war. At the time, supporters on the Tamil mainland instigated riots and self-­ demolitions. My assistant was off work due to a three-­week closure of the universities, a TV-series on Tamil history was broadcast non-­stop, and I read about the situation in the Indian national magazine Frontline (2009). A few months after the death of the LTTE leader Prabhakaran, I read a glorifying biography of his capacities (Kuppusamy 2009). Secondly, my anthropological interest turned to transformational processes caused by flight and migration. This shift was related to experiences in London where the presence of

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diaspora groups forms a large part of everyday life, but also to the necessity to counter misunderstandings by increased knowledge on intercultural dialogues. The kolam practice appeared as a relevant point of entry into a study of the Tamil diaspora. The initial idea was to expand the doctoral thesis for publication with this material, and involve diaspora members in an exhibition about their situation based on collaborative artistic work. My hitherto explorations with art practice and continued publications on the overlap between art and anthropology motivated more explicit and thorough engagements. The attempts with artistic workshops described in the previous chapter provided increased knowledge of the everyday lives of the participants, as well as of the role of images and objects in the constitution of social relationships and cultural values. In addition, the kolam exhibitions assessed in Chapter 3 and 5 demonstrated a synaesthetic possibility to evoke understanding and they accomplished a dissemination of my work beyond academia. During a research project at the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm which investigated experimental methods in studies of their collections, I incorporated drawing in my exploration of Tamil palm leaf books on sorcery held in the archive. The books contained designs intended to aid the sorcerer and the method of drawing them resonated with my embodied skills in the benevolent kolam practice which improved my understanding of the malevolent nature and effect of sorcery designs (Laine 2013). These positive results spurred me to develop a research project in which my explorations of artistic practices as methods and presentations of research could advance. The ad hoc solutions presented in Chapter 2 were no longer an option. However, the iconophobic attitude towards aesthetic and affective responses to images as a threat to scientific rigour and the constitution of valid anthropological knowledge became an obstacle in this aim. I was advised by well-­meaning colleagues to make a choice between being an anthropologist or artist, and if choosing the former, abide by the rules of using visual materials as evidence and illustrations. Arguments of not being able to make a career was supplemented by the discriminatory statement that it would prevent me from the possibility to start a family (which I already had, and ‘advice’ hardly given to male scholars). The situation followed the description made by Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz in their evaluation of the current realignment of art and anthropology where ‘y[Y]ounger scholars are often warned to respect the conventions or their professional credentials will be compromised’ (2015: 419). Similarly, Schneider and Wright note a deep-­rooted conservatism and a policing of research students who aim to expand methodologies and presentations towards art practice (2010: 3). Fortunately, well-­meaning colleagues of a more creative and bold kind supported my ambitions. It was time to develop a new strategy. The reluctance towards experimenta­ tion within anthropology and my persistent aim to further investigate artistic or

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art-­based practices subsequently directed me towards the field of artistic research. Although this newly established discipline to a large extent focused on the development of art as an autonomous field, my funding application positioned at the intersection with anthropology was approved. Backed by the Swedish Research Council, my way of working took a new turn and as if standing on an avenue I saw a number of unimagined routes of being plural rather than singular. To experiment with and generate knowledge through materials, objects and relations beyond linguistic discourse and textual representation had become an intriguing requirement in the project on Tamil diasporic existence. The kolam event played a key role in this development.

Shifting kolam practices As my interests shifted towards the diaspora, I began to ask questions about kolam practices among Tamils in Sri Lanka when I revisited Tamil Nadu. The ongoing war prevented a fieldtrip to the island and there was no available research on the issue. However, people in general held that the practice was more or less the same as on the mainland. Knowledge of kolam and Tamil forms of visuality and materiality superseded my insights into the civil war and the following flight and global fragmentation of families and villages. Therefore, I reasoned that kolam would be a relevant starting point for my engagements with the diaspora in London. This notion formed my plans and applications from 2009 until I was able to make a preliminary study during 2011. During two summer months, I began to develop a network of migrants and refuges with a background in the north and northeast regions of Sri Lanka. Kolam soon became a questionable focus. Firstly, the practice had a different position in Sri Lanka compared to the Indian context. It was not part of everyday life across socioreligious hierarchies but mainly a prerogative of Brahmin women. Members of other castes could even connect the practice with Hindu orthodoxy, as one woman of Vellala1 belonging in East Ham explained, ‘No we don’t make kolam in this house, we are not that religious and we also eat meat.’ However, several non-Brahmins argued that celebrations like weddings, a girl’s first menstruation, and the Pongal festival, would feel incomplete without any kind of kolam. Secondly, kolam in the diaspora had transformed to an indoor practice due to fears about complaints from neighbours and clashes with British aesthetics and morality. This latter point could have been the subject of diaspora research, but encounters during the preliminary study revealed that it would not capture the political and emotional tensions embedded in everyday life. These frictions concerned nationalist constructions of Tamil identity, methods used by the LTTE during the liberation struggle, fear of treason, and the persistent conflict between Tamils, Sinhalese, and Muslims.

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These subjects often evoked fierce responses that varied from thorough affirmation, claim of disengagement or fear of treason. The kolam practice did not provide appropriate routes to an understanding of this situation. But it became a medium through which I could engage with Tamils in the UK. The preliminary study took place in Southwest and East London, Coventry and Leicester. The attention I gave to kolam sometimes increased people’s engagement with the practice, and this unexpected intervention posed an ethical dilemma for my work. I have developed this issue elsewhere (Laine 2012) and it brought me from worries of intrusion towards the possibility of explicit and planned intervention as part of my way of working. The field of applied visual anthropology where politically engaged anthropologists aim to solve problems of subaltern groups (Pink 2004, 2007), leaning towards the more assertive activist anthropology (Sanford and Angel-Ajani 2006) but with a specific focus on visual methods, evolved as a possible alternative. I was also looking at community art projects that had worked for improvements in marginalized areas (Kester 2004; Crehan 2012), including the critique of poor implementation from addressed community members who in many cases had felt subordinated by the initiating artists’ claim of expertise (Crehan 2012: 195). Could I do a kind of activist participation rather than participant observation and work with empowerment of the Tamil refugees’ capacity to challenge their disadvantaged positions through art that was sensitive to Tamil notions of aesthetics? Weekend schools and refugee centres were nodes in the preliminary study. The TCC in Hounslow became the main collaborator and they played a large role in the performance of ‘Making kolams in London’ a year later. This centre stood out through its inclusiveness towards refuges who had developed traumas and alcoholic problems during the war, and it welcomed people of lower castes and various religions. Many other centres were dominated by well-­established Vellala Hindus who claimed a higher level of diaspora existence in relation to the British surroundings. However, the coordinator at TCC, Rani, was firm in her exclusion of political discussion to avoid tension. This was based on her marriage to an activist of a Tamil liberation front in deadly conflict with the LTTE and intersecting experiences of treason. Rani was keen on exploring various activities at the centre and she suggested that we should organise a public kolam competition. The limited timeframe only permitted a short intervention during the Refugee Week, an annual event in the borough organized to bring together people from the various refugee and migrant communities in the borough. Rita and three other women from the centre made two kolams outside the entrance to welcome the guests. Then we decided to expand the idea if I was able to return for a comprehensive research. I was back nine months later, and we started to negotiate a plan.

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Negotiating the setting The TCC had partly transformed during my ten months’ absence. A British NGO conducted fieldwork within the centre for a study on the situation of Tamil refugees, and Rani’s inclusive approach had incorporated women from Algeria, Iran and Iraq in a weekly English class. It became crowded with both the NGO and my own investigation, and our various views on ethics caused tensions certainly not needed among the refugees. The situation evoked a sense of intrusion in a space intended to support people who had lived through war and flight. The inclusion of other national backgrounds made it necessary to critically rethink the boundary of Tamil that I had constructed around my project. I considered a reconfiguration into a study of the diaspora situation in a broader sense, but lack of background knowledge of the participants from other regions motivated a sustained focus on the Tamil communities. The emphasis slowly shifted towards Tamil practitioners of contemporary art, which will be developed in the next chapter. But the collaboration with TCC continued to a certain degree and it initially focused on the kolam event. Rani further provided the link to the already mentioned artist, Hari, and he wanted to be a co-­organiser of the event. The three of us began a renegotiation of how and why the performance should be realized. From Rani’s perspective, it was an extension of the joint celebrations she organized at the time of Tamil festivals to reconnect with positive memories of their lives before migration and flight and to acknowledge them as part of a changed present. Kolam has a large role in Tamil festivities where collaborative drawing and the resulting designs increase the joyous and auspicious atmosphere. It is common to organize competitions during the Pongal festival in both Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, and this was the obvious format for Rani. But Hari was against the idea of a competition. He criticized the loss of creativity and sensuous engagements in everyday lives exhausted by the endless form-­ filling required in the asylum-­seeking process and demands for a fast-track integration into British society. What they really needed, according to Hari, was a space for enjoyment without the pressure a competition could evoke.2 My aim was to persist as the researcher without an explicit opinion, but this shifted towards an engagement that largely was in agreement with Hari. While Rani held that it would be safer to make the event behind the walls of the centre’s compound to not disturb any outsiders, Hari and I were interested in this possibility of disturbance. The two of us had discussed the event as an action that could challenge the lack of visibility and presence of kolam in the Britsh environment and encourage the Tamil women to claim space for themselves through kolam drawing. Hari did not want the TCC members to think of themselves as a vulnerable group that had to be protected within a compound. But Rani was worried about her permission to rent the facilities

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they used and further about how to fund possible costs linked to the council permit required to do anything in public. Then Rita was approached. She held a certain position through the kolam skills she had gained by growing up with daily drawing in South India (unlike the other Tamil members who had a background in Sri Lanka) and her devoted voluntary work at the centre. Rita was also respected by her decision to recommence her daily kolam-making in London, despite the risks of being gazed at and harassed by neighbours. To many Tamils’ surprise, Rita managed to advance her relationship with people in her street through mutually curious dialogues, sometimes triggered by her kolam designs. When she affirmed the suggestion to abandon the competition format and take an experimental and improvisational stance in public, Rani approved of the idea. Rita proposed the initial workshop to make people comfortable with the drawing and the designs, and it was decided that she would lead this exercise as well as coach us in public. Hari and I walked back and forth in Hounslow centre looking for a place that would enable people passing by to deviate from their shopping errands and participate in the action. We found an inviting site between the main street and a large parking area. Rita examined the suitability of the asphalt surface and its beige colour, and a final agreement was made. Hari wanted to challenge the boundaries of the kolam practice further, its link to the construction of what he perceived as a compulsory femininity as well as its ideal forms and materials. His motivations were at odds with dominant values in Tamil culture, and founded in his experiences of violence enacted through nationalist and caste ideologies during the civil war. At the same time, he wanted to engage with his Tamil background and the kolammaking which continued to be part of his mother’s daily work in her temple outside Jaffna. Hari did not articulate this criticality during the negotiations with TCC, but Rani and Rita were aware of his approach. The interventions brought forth by Hari increased the level of activism in the kolam event, relative to the surroundings but perhaps even more to norms within the Tamil communities. This also made us alternately refer to the project as an action. From my anthropological perspective and interest in relationality, Hari’s intentions could give me clues to understand how Tamils positioned themselves within the group and further towards the multi-­ethnic suburban environment. In addition, the public event became a method to investigate how the participants related to kolam, what an actual engagement with the practice meant and how this affected them. Importantly for my new focus on contemporary artists, the action became a method to better understand Hari’s artistic intentions. My initial hiding behind his explicit activism developed into a sincere engagement in claiming space for Tamil visibility in an environment of increasing racism, and in opening up a space for interaction between various ethnic groups. We spread the word inside the centre, through flyers in

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FIGURE 7.1

Tamil and English, and an inviting article in the local Tamil magazine Anchal. I arranged a permission from the council to use the site we had chosen. This was a fairly easy task, but their consent was based on extensive regulations regarding the cleaning up. The terms of collaboration and participation were thus set by Rani, Hari, Rita, myself, and the council. We contributed with various ideas, intentions and commitments, and they came into play in relation to the environment and its multiple hierarchies.

Interventions in Hounslow shopping centre The majority of women and girls at TCC had watched kolam-making at festivals and functions, but not necessarily drawn any of their own. This called for a workshop the day before the main event where people could explore the practice in the familiar environment inside the centre. Even though the skills of drawing kolam with pen on paper are different from making them with powder on the ground, we believed that the indoor experience would engender a more relaxed mode at the public action. But our reasoning of the need for increased self-­confidence in public did not hold. The TCC members interpreted our plan as two opportunities to engage in kolam and few took part in both. At both places, the participants embraced the drawing in a very straightforward manner without any sign of hesitation. When Rita marked the beginning of the public action, the participants revealed a sense of being at ease and belonging with the kolam. One teenage girl in whose home nobody had made kolam had

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prepared a large design on paper at home, and she was very eager to get it exactly right. Older women who had more experience and respect gave advice to the younger ones. But there was also a firmness in the advice; the girl that initiated an experimental design using her hand prints was immediately told off. While the majority followed Rita’s lead, Hari set out to do things differently. His experiments broke the aesthetic norms of the ideal symmetrical form structured by dots and lines drawn with powdered materials. He used a plastic glove to protect his hands from certain colours and this detached him from the tactile aspects of the work. Instead of merely evoking cheerful memories, Hari used yellow and dripping red to articulate blood stains and experiences of the violent civil war. But no one was offended or told him off. A few other Tamil men joined the group and their drawing of the Olympic circles with reference to the ongoing games was appreciated. Kolam-making is a prerogative of women and girls in South Asia, and because Hari was perceived as a young man nobody expected him or the adult men to make ‘proper’ kolams. Thus, Hari’s aim to challenge how the ideal Tamil femininity was embodied and re-­ enacted through the kolam practice did not have the intended effect. It continued to be the girls and women who were required to do it correctly. The main part of the action proceeded in a joyous mode, but there were also certain frictions. The experimental kolam-making encouraged in Hari’s tent was heeded by a woman who did not have any relationship to kolam or Tamil imagery. She wanted to claim space for Iranians and wrote statements about their scientific achievements. Unfortunately, this became a cause of anxiety. The English wording could have been interpreted as an encouragement to drink more alcohol when the woman in fact wanted to present an Iranian invention of its medical use. It was Rani who brought this to my attention and we were concerned that the council on which she depended for the centre’s activities would perceive this as an anti-British approach to alcohol consumption and withdraw their support. Or even disrupt the present action. We decided to erase the statements, although some moments of agitated debate were needed before we could make the message clear. Perhaps this friction may seem irrelevant to the exploration of Tamil presence, but the aim is to provide transparency of the ethnographic material and illuminate the inevitable play of serendipity during planned events. My desire to take part in the drawing had to be negotiated with the need to provide documentation of methodological choices and my aim to create an artistic audiovisual work as part of the research presentation. The initial workshop was a relaxed event and I felt comfortable to take a seat at the table and engage with coloured pencils and paper. The public event involved various stages of labour before and after the kolam drawing, and as a co-­organiser I had to collaborate in the work. Hari, Rani, myself, and a few other members at the centre, put up the two party-­tents that had been delivered to my house

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a week earlier. K. Krishnarajah, an artist central to my new project, took the lead in hanging the designs from the workshop on the walls inside the tents. Hari’s cousin Ezhilojan Jeyakumar, who later became involved in the artist group, was also active in the preparations. Rita took action on the ground by sweeping and then starting the actual kolam-making. I decided to work with my video camera, and most of the recorded material is of a documentary kind. Throughout the action, my recording oscillated between complete presence in the drawing and the dialogues the performance was enacted through, and a certain distance to find suitable angles and details for further mediation. When the drawing came to an end several hours later, we organizers collaborated in keeping our promise to the council – that there could not be any visible remnants of the event the next day. It was not an option to keep up my videoing when we had to carry water from the nearest tap 800 metres away and thoroughly brush the asphalt surface free from intriguing sparkling designs. The prolonged effect of kolam designs beautifying the street until they are worn out by passing vehicles and people could thus not be part of our action. We were only allowed to be visible in an organized time-­limited form. The kolam action evoked imaginations and memories of the Tamil countries in India and Sri Lanka. In Hari’s words, ‘it made us recall, remember and reconnect to a part of our memory that we do not access every day.’ The corporeal engagements with the drawing material, the rhythmical skills of drawing and the required bodily posture, evoked tactile memories of a shared past. While kolam-making was an embodied skill for women like Rita, it was more often an inherited memory among the second generation born in the diaspora. In this sense, the event mediated between different generations. For those who experienced uncertainty in their new environment and aimed for a continuity of Tamil practices, the event established a sense of empowerment. The kolam makers expressed pride in the temporary possibility to reconnect with their shared history, and in turn share it with others. But for Hari, there was a slight disappointment in not being able to provoke arguments about his unconventional designs and motivations. The Hounslow environment was defined by commercial interests and British norms of tidiness and order. At the same time, it contained anxieties of loss and misinterpretations among several communities with a background outside the European borders. The aim of bringing the culturally diverse inhabitants together through kolam-making had a certain effect. Several paused their errands to participate, either by looking and chatting or through material engagements in drawing. The usual fast pace between shops and homes changed momentarily into a site of creative engagements where curiosity took hold and enabled new encounters. As organizers, we felt content about our collaborative and participatory intervention, and members at TCC suggested more events of public kolam-making in the near future.

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Interventions in academic contexts During the kolam action, the practice transformed into a collective tool that expanded Tamil public presence and visibility. It challenged British aesthetics and increasing racism which have made women refrain from making outdoor kolams in their new neighbourhoods. It was a method to explore the situation of Tamil migrants and refugees, particularly regarding shifting relationships between kolam makers, the practice and its altered environment. This chapter suggests that the main issue of the action is that it provided a possibility to make claims and share Tamil presence and knowledge in the diaspora setting, and subsequently knowledge on their position in British society. Exploring various concepts and theoretical frameworks across art and anthropology, for example through a seemingly related trajectory where Christina Lammer has chosen to publish accounts of her experimental video-­based ways of working within applied visual anthropology (2007) as well as art and anthropology (2013), I have arrived at the conclusion that whether the kolam action should be considered as art or anthropology is a minor matter. In this sense, it becomes a transdisciplinary act where I prefer to focus on the research question. Through this mode, the continuous critical search for relevant models and frameworks has become both liberating and gratifying where disciplinary alliances and loyalties lose their relevance. The event in Hounslow developed through a combination of artistic and anthropological practices motivated by the notion that change can be accomplished through relationships that emphasize a politically and ethically aware exchange. But how attentive was I to the power relations at play? What kind of change did I think was possible? Was my part of the intervention meaningful or merely a disturbance? Hari and I have continued our collaboration, and joint critical reflections on both our roles during the kolam action have been central to my understanding of what we accomplished. In a participatory presentation that I will return to below, Hari asserted: Both Anna and I were observable outsiders to making kolams. Anna, a white-­ skinned European researcher, me a metropolitan artist with fancy ideas. In my experience of that day, I was able to see how people relied upon a white presence to negotiate with British space. The event carried a legitimacy because it had fliers in English, it had a white person’s validating approval and it had a metropolitan artist to translate that approval to that community. Are we appropriating and orientalising the cultural practice of kolam for the western gaze? What are the ethics of our engagement to these practices? This statement holds important additions to my awareness of how we related to each other during the kolam event. Anthropological training has

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enhanced my sensitivity towards ethical considerations which informed my notion that it was crucial to focus on the Tamil perspective and not impose my own aims and initiatives on the diaspora communities. I took a slightly passive stance and did not approach the council to facilitate the process of earning their permission until Rani had asked me to, but was more active in practical tasks such as making materials available. It is of course possible to question the need for my participation in the first place. However, the environment was partly hostile to black and brown bodies and as Hari pointed out, my whiteness was one of the facilitating capacities I possessed. My naïve sense of colour and race as less relevant than, for example, economic structures, was at pains and I looked at my own body and the power implications of its outside with disgust. This broadened my understanding of the intersectional form of the global power relations we were embedded in. While my knowledge on kolam since fieldwork in India and my position as academic researcher in relation to the emphasis on high educational level in Tamil stratification influenced the possibility to establish trust and legitimize my participation, my white skin played an additionally facilitating role in relation to the British environment. At this point, I became aware of how the issue of skin tone also had been a central aspect of the exhibition in New Delhi, between the white European and the brown Oriental as well as the related differentiation between the fairness of north Indian citizens and the darkness of those from the south.3 My late realization of the inevitable position provoked by whiteness might be related to the construction of Sweden as a site of antiracist politics and colour-­ blindness during the decades of my childhood. Even in my anthropological training, we had problems of translating ‘race’ from the English literature as this concept was abolished on official and academic levels and experiences of discrimination based on this category among Swedes with dark complexions were silenced or transformed into issues of ethnicity or cultural difference.4 Importantly, Hari clarified that he also perceived his part as the facilitator’s, translating between various motivations and evaluations from an outsider’s and in-­between position. This had forced him to question whether his engagements in the event could be understood as appropriating and orientalising a practice he actually grew up with. But my interpretation of the event is that the TCC members held ownership of kolam and enjoyed in sharing and supporting Hari’s experiments, although the expansion of their everyday space was a momentary alteration. At the same time, it revealed porous overlaps between who was the insider and outsider in relation to TCC and the wider Tamil diaspora. It also complicated notions of possible conceptualizations of the terms collaborator and participant. The employment of participant and collaborator in this account of the kolam action has followed Schneider and Wright’s argument that the terms need to be separated in order to better evaluate considerations of ethics and power

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relations – according to level of involvement and recognition of agency where the first term implicates a weaker taking part and the latter a stronger co-­ labour (2013:11). However, the participants actually laboured even though they were not part of the negotiations of the conditions and the decision-­making process. They put up tents, drew kolam designs and helped to clean the area, and the event would not have been realized without their commitment. Particularly in the kolam-making, a practice connected to women’s labour in the house, people used their individual presence and creative agency to transform the space, similarly to how the participants in the workshops in Chennai developed the initial framework into a collaborative investigation. This prompts the question if Schneider and Wright’s differentiation between taking part and co-­labour values intellectual production above manual work. But if they mean that cognitive and physical labour, as verbalizing or crafting forms of agency and enacted either on beforehand or during the event, are equally valued it follows that the majority of those who participated in the kolam event were collaborators. Hari’s experimental kolams would not have made sense without their more conventional counterparts, but at the same time deciding where to make the action cannot be equally valued as raising a tent. The propositions of the term collaboration are further complicated by how Grant Kester relates it to socially and politically engaged contemporary art (2011). He uses collaborative rather than participatory and emphasizes the ambivalence inherent in the term collaboration. It has a second meaning that denotes ‘cooperate treasonably, as with an enemy occupation force’ and by connotation collaborative therefore carries a warning of betrayal (Kester 2011: 2). Following Kester, the alternately positive and negative associations are suitable to define that any working together actually entails an ambiguity embodied in all human intentions and relationships, an ethical undecidability. At the same time, he argues for a more nuanced and critical discussion of the distribution of agency within collaborative projects and thus questions the ideas of Claire Bishop and Nicolas Bourriaud where the artist should work autonomously from participants skilled in other cultural practices in order to develop an aesthetic criticality appropriate to the claim of collaborative art as an avant-­garde form (ibid: 33). Kester differentiates between who has been involved beforehand or invited to contribute during the enactment of an event, and suggests particular attention to the space for improvizational responsiveness in the latter process. This issue will be returned to in the concluding chapter in relation to Samuel Biancini and Erik Verhagen’s proposition of the term ‘conditional art’ (2016). Hari and myself discussed how the kolam event could be transformed into research dissemination that remained an open continuity with shared authority, rather than the conventional paper with a conclusive argument. When the University of Westminster organised the symposium ‘South Asian

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floor-­drawings and murals’ in 2013, we decided to make a collaborative presentation. We agreed to extend the idea that informed the suburban event: to challenge the social relationships at the site of performance and investigate the action’s performative effects. In addition to the analytical paper with a PowerPoint of what already had taken place, the expected procedure in the academic context, we invited the present scholars to become participants in a direct continuation of the previous event. They were thus handed paper and rice flour and invited to become immersed in experiential learning. The action addressed tactile and moving dimensions of social life, and evoked the participants’ close attention rather than showing a stable representation where they could remain passive. The scholars at Westminster were specialists in social science and the humanities who gave the standard presentation, except one who was an artist and made a kolam on stage while the others could watch. They performed what Roger Sansi refers to as ‘legitimate forms of obtaining recognition’ within one’s field of expertise (2015: 154). He points at the problem of maintaining the politics of social experimentation in collaborative and participatory processes when it comes to research output framed by the politics of academia. Aims of constituting research subjects as co-­researchers in collaborative events, such as my interactions with Hari, and our aim of involving an academic audience in artistic practice, are usually transformed by the disciplinary preference of a single author of a coherent thesis. The prestigious institutions that provide professional careers continuously claim certain autonomy in relation to other disciplines where various claims of knowledge production are emphasized. At the symposium, many scholars yet argued that the unexpected collective kolam-making Hari and myself organized had been an excellent addition in their learning about South Asian drawing. It was perceived as an explorative moment within the framework of an academic institution which provided insights not accessible through the standardized form of listening and looking from a distance. The change of position brought forth at the symposium can be connected to Tim Ingold’s notions of forward and retrospective movements in anthropological practice. He articulates a need for research presentations that bridge the gap between ongoing experience and observation during fieldwork and the retrospective analytical form of the final written description, and suggests that the larger attention to openness and experiments in art can help anthropologists rethink their way of working into a more processual form (Ingold 2011). Ingold exemplifies his position with an abstract gestural line drawing to convey his experience of a fish jumping in water instead of an illustrative image that shows all the details of the body of the fish. But the beholder has to look with it, instead of at it, in order to grasp the movement and continuity it aims to convey (ibid: 1–2). In a similar manner, the participants

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at Westminster and in Hounslow learned about kolam as a continuously evolving practice by looking with. Importantly, people were also acting with, as in Ingold’s emphasis on making and the capacity of increased sensory awareness and dynamic transformation inherent in the process (2013). This making focuses on artists’ practical engagements with materials of the world where the relations between subject, object and environment are intimate and fluid. The kolam event was realized by people who acted as makers of things as well as makers of pre-­set conditions, respectively referred to as participants and collaborators, and who created a momentary shift of their relationship to each other, the kolam, the environment, their memories and imaginations. Collaborative and participatory art projects commonly include interactions with materials, such as the eating and making of food, shovelling of sand, and engagements with cardboard boxes,5 but when they are discussed in contemporary art theory their relational capacity refers to interactions between human beings where various notions of subjectivity are employed (Bourriaud 2002: 60; Bishop 2004: 66; Kester 2011: 82). The artists in this field deliberately turned away from technical skills and material crafting which might affect the analytical disinterest in the agency of materials and subject–­object relations. This direction might also be related to the dominance of poststructuralism in art criticism since the 1990s, ‘in which the act of critique must be insulated from the exigencies of practice or direct action’ (Kester 2011: 13). Interactions with the environment have however been addressed in Kester’s discussion of how various art collectives have engaged with both rural and urban localities in longer term collaborations aimed to resist unequal change evoked by neoliberal developments. One example is the Dialogue collective based in central India which has facilitated improvements in Adivasi villages through reciprocal learning processes of planning and making alterations with close attention to local conceptions of space and social interaction (ibid: 77– 95).6 Sansi has discussed a related lack of attention to object agency in the philosophical framework of Jacques Rancière, a model which at first appeared useful for understanding how the kolam event challenged British aesthetics. Rancière argues that aesthetics not only is a part of everyday life (as opposed to the conception of art as autonomous) but also is at the core of politics. The current aesthetic regime operates through a distribution of the sensible, defined as ‘the system of self-­evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it’ (Rancière 2004: 12). This is a system that affects how we perceive the world, and it operates in a manner that makes us take it for granted. It reveals what can be said in relation to what is seen, and what is visible in relation to what is invisible. It can thus be said to hold sway over the image of society. The

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system is governed by the current political regime, and this regime determines who has (or lacks) the ability to influence what can be articulated. That which is ‘given’ is not equally distributed, and depending on the position of the artist within the regime, this person can intervene in it by making political art (the politics of aesthetics) (Rancière 2004, 2011). Sansi suggests that Rancière’s reintegration of art and everyday life dissolves the separation between aesthetics and ethics, but that the philosopher further points towards a disregard of an agency attributed to things – it is only humans who can question the aesthetic regime (2015: 82, 85). From this perspective, materials and objects cannot effect developments of collaborative and participatory art events, and they cannot be incorporated into the Hindu notion of fluidity between persons and things where the kolam effects its environment. The collaborative methods and exchanges Hari and I embarked on through the kolam event expanded during continued work with Tamil diaspora artists. But instead of developing the activist aspects of artistic methods, they were employed to understand the artists’ practices and current situations followed by research presentations capable of evoking critical reflection. The Tamil artists’ ways of exploring the complexities of belonging as migrants and refugees will be described in the following chapter and further illuminate how social relationships are constituted and negotiated through intimate engagements with materials, objects and art practice.

8 Sharing practices with British Tamil artists

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his chapter elucidates how contemporary artists of the Tamil diaspora in the UK use their art practice to investigate experiences of migration, flight and complex uncertain belongings. The artists are linked through their background in the Jaffna district of Sri Lanka, a region marked by thirty years of civil war between the Sinhala government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) which scattered Tamil families into global expatriate minority communities. They further share the use of artistic practices of thinking and making to reconnect with fragmented memories, displaced skills, lost objects and confused feelings in their diasporic setting of traversing and negotiating between several different cultures. In their work, traces of war and displacement encounter memories of a peaceful past as well as resistance towards contemporary cultural values, and they become individually renegotiated through chosen materials, textures and colours. Contemporary Tamil artists are few and lack institutional support, in Sri Lanka as well as in the diaspora. Their focus on visual art that combines EuroAmerican and South Asian elements has been devalued by the Tamil nationalist movement that emphasizes artistic forms based on ancient literature and poetry, and by Sinhala nationalism that oppresses all Tamil expressions. The British art scene has categorized Tamil art as ethnic and requires visual references to cultural difference in relation to the dominating aesthetic regimes of Euro-American art.1 During fieldwork in London 2012, initially focused on diasporic existence, I became acquainted with six Tamil artists. Their situation and work became the main interest of my research and fieldwork continued over a period of seventeens months, in London, High Wycombe, Belfast, and an additional journey to Jaffna. The planning of the Tamil diaspora research was guided by aims for shared authority and collaboration, and the possibility to implement this approach through the inclusion of artistic methods and presentations. The successive focus on diaspora members committed to art practice in their everyday lives

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and work reinforced the sense of exchange. We shared aims and experiences of how artistic practices could be used to engender knowledge and some of the artists had also engaged in anthropology. When it became clear that they were concerned with their own investigation of Tamil diasporic existence, the potential of collaboration expanded. We moved towards a relationship of co-­researchers through a sharing between my research and the artists’ self-­research. After a few months of interaction, we decided on videoing as a suitable method to explore the artists’ way of working and being. It was agreed that I could edit the material into a piece potentially applicable both as a form of research presentation and within an art context. The participating artists made suggestions of how and where to be recorded, and their individual ideas in interaction with our respective relationships were constitutive of the resulting sequences. We explored their engagements with the material environment, walking streets and parks, touching buildings and objects, and handling materials in their studios. Sometimes they engaged in art making when I recorded, sometimes they spoke with people we met. At times situations emerged spontaneously, but we more often staged a setting. The kolam event described in the previous chapter was another form of collaboration which engaged two of the artists. The idea of a workshop slowly grew into the process. I got to know the six artists through various networks, and it turned out that they had not all been aware of each other’s existence. My accounts of one artist when visiting another increased their curiosity of each other, and their lack of peers motivated us to arrange a gathering where they could meet and share their works, thoughts and experiences of being a Tamil and a contemporary artist in the UK. At the same time, our preparatory discussions remained open-­ended to avoid any pressure of asserting similarities. This intervention held the potential of strengthening the artists and their precarious situation within both Tamil and British communities. The progressive refugee centre which initiated the kolam event, TCC, lent their office space for the workshop during one of their regular Saturday family activities. In the following, the artists are presented through a shortened version of their own contributions at the workshop and thus based on how they chose to introduce themselves to each other in this particular context. Their dialogues are accompanied by a few clarifications. The artists are: Sabes Sugunasabesan, Reginald S. Aloysius, K. Krishnarajah, Hari Rajaledchumy, Aruntha Ratnaraj and Anushiya Sundaralingam.2 It turned out that a couple are cousins, some used to know each other in Jaffna, or had heard about one another, two have got to know each other in London, and some were complete strangers. In terms of caste and class, they shared membership in the upper levels. Although they had different political opinions about Tamil social structures, this common membership constituted an additional level of shared history. Reginald was

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born in London while the others spent most of their childhood and youth in Jaffna. As will be shown, they had various access to art education but even if some took place in the UK and others in Sri Lanka they were all shaped within Euro-American frameworks of modernism and postmodernism. In Hari’s case, art education took place after the completion of the current research. During the almost three-­hour-long workshop, art works and cherished objects were shown and discussed in relation to what held the artists together and what set them apart. English was the main language, as both Reginald and myself do not know enough Tamil. But the others sometimes referred to Tamil concepts and expressions to make a point clearer, which then was translated to English. Certain words and tones of voices brought forth intense emotions expressed or held back in gestures and silences, clearly understood by all participants but less accessible in this written account. To express their engagement in art, and the character of the few Tamils who visited their exhibitions, the English term art lovers was often used.

Workshop encounters Sabes  I did this for a group exhibition that was titled Memorials. Normally, I work without a preconceived idea, I take photographs, I think about it, I look for objects, then finally something happens, so . . . I arrive at it. What I arrived at [here] is so to say . . . the memorabilia. The objects are the memorials. They contain memories and I use this to pass on these memories. That’s the kind of idea . . . These are from home, from when I went back home recently. That pannadai [Palmyra tree fibres] my daughter picked up from the ground [Figure 8.1, the centre and top right photographs]. And then I was playing with the pannadai, to see what would happen /. . ./ What was happening was, yeah, the pannadai looks like an aeroplane, or a boat. I was thinking about how we have moved, fast, away, through sail or whatever. /. . ./ When we went there my aunt decided to have an age attaining ceremony, to make it happen in a big way. Oh, she said: She [the daughter] attained age [puberty] and she didn’t have the ceremony. So she organized it. Then she [the daughter] was holding the chambu [sacred vessel], and that chambu was part of the house, our household [photograph right below]. We used it a lot every day. I have those things with me now. So you think these are a kind of expression of how I pass on memories. Then the same holiday, I took this picture, it’s part of a bigger one [Figure 8.1, the top left photograph]. [We were] in Pollunaruwa, I saw that chambu, I connected it [to our own] to pass on more . . . When I work like that some things also come up in writing, so I wrote that bit [photograph left below]. Let’s take a moment so that you can read it. No wait, I’ll read it:

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FIGURE 8.1   Sabes Sugunasabesan’s contribution to the group exhibition Memorial at Greenwich Gallery, London, 2012. The show was constituted by Crossing Lines, based on a collaboration between London Independent Photography and Centre for Urban & Community Research at Goldsmiths. The photographs are ca 20 × 30 cm.

     Memory My great, great, grandmothers passed it on to me. My memory stands out as memorial itself. I pass my memory down the line. Faded, embellished and re-­formed. My memory lives. Across the seas and memorials. Our children fought and died for an idea. When their war memorials were desecrated by bulldozers. We carried the fragments across the oceans. And passed them on to our future. Our memories don’t seem to rid of us! They seem to have an uncanny knack. To survive through generations, lands and across the

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Seas. And stick to us. Our great, great grandmothers’ memories. And the war memorials of our children Live across the seas, lands, in hills and Down the oceans. Another tsunami may drown some and reveal some Hidden ones! Various things come together, they are kind of constructed. And that picture I did long time ago at the house that we lived, this is the back of that house [Figure 8.1, top centre photograph]. And the chambu, I then gave it to my son, that is this picture, the chambu in his hand and in my hand [photograph centre below]. Then today I was thinking, actually, I do this work, but what do I REALLY pass on? Culture, religion, language? I don’t. So it becomes a question. Sabes, a self-­taught photographer, had laid out his works on the floor, and when it was Anushiya’s turn, she asked him to leave the picture of the pannadai. Next to this, she placed a real piece she had picked up during her last visit to Jaffna in 1995 along with graphic works printed on paper she had made of fibres from coconut and banana trees. Anushiya says: ‘These objects are part of me, of Sri Lanka’, and everybody articulates appreciation when the tree fibre materializes as a common link between them. The content of the prints became secondary, but they depict objects related to Hindu practices and were presented in the form of a temple festival at Anushiya’s degree show in Belfast. The atmosphere has shifted from Sabes’ reflective mode to Anushiya’s intense and spontaneous gestures. While she fills the floor with prints, drawings, and photographs of installations, sculptures and paintings, she outlines her career from the arrival in England through marriage in the late 1980s, the art education at the University of Ulster and her current practices in Belfast. She describes processes of making, how tree fibres are cooked and made into pulp before being flattened into paper and how she has opened and coloured in the fibres to make print-to-print images. She has her own studio where she explores further Sri Lankan materials such as bangles, sari fabric and bamboo. Anushiya  I did landscape work, I also make big scale, different kinds of scales. The line has started to go through them, they all have different lines, and then one day I was wearing bangles and they had lines as well, so I like

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the movements of the circle, the lines, the trees, the nature, so that’s my landscape. So I started to make just lines and these . . . Again I used leaves, different strings, and print. I like the texture so I used encoating with wax, bees wax and different types of waxes to create texture, and then I used these bangles so I started to put together all the bangles, I put together bangles and coated them with wax so it became small columns. And used colour. In my early work I used quite a lot of red but I stopped using red and went into blue and made these blue series of bangles and prints, paintings and drawings. But then, the bangles were very hard to work with so I thought how can I make these columns, so bangles became into bamboos. I used the bamboos for my three dimensional piece. And then work around the piece . . . so again in this process I used print making techniques and painting techniques, a kind of mixed media, and I used string, I print on linen, use different kinds of thread, and again encoated mixed media, I put on paint and then I take it off like a print making. I use processes of etching, lithographs, and screen prints, where you add paint and then take it off. I use it even though it’s three dimensional pieces, I treat them like plates. Anushiya often works with socially engaged art in collaboration with local community groups that aim to bridge across communal divisions between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Sometimes this work directly affects Anushiya’s individual practices, as during one event with children when paper was folded into multiple dresses and further expanded by light and shadows. She calls them figures with ‘some kind of story’, but at the same time their lack of heads makes them anonymous. Sabes wants to know what Anushiya did before she left Jaffna. He is almost sixty and migrated already in 1974, and grapples with a large gap combined with a sense of bad conscience for leaving others behind and not passing things on. Anushiya describes her A and O levels without enough art, and continues: Anushiya  Then I wanted to go and study art, but my father thought I was too young and my parents didn’t want me to go anywhere . . . so I studied computers. And then I had a show and then I started teachers’ training and came back here [to England], then got married, came here and waited to get a grant, and when I got it I studied art. I ask about her art training in Jaffna which she has told me about earlier. She is not keen on this topic and says that those classes with Rajah Master only was about learning techniques. However, Sabes wants more: Sabes  But the landscape you are making, where is that landscape from?

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Anushiya  I work with some photographs, but it’s very abstract, it’s mainly . . . again it’s patterns as well, repeated patterns . . . Even though I do modern work, I’m inspired by my culture, you know the colour, the patterns, everything. Anushiya uses the term modern to refer to western art, which could also be postmodern and contemporary work, and she subsequently contrasts this with her own implicitly traditional culture. The next person is Hari, in his early twenties and youngest among the participants. He fled to London from the war zone in 2009 and as an asylum seeker he still waits for permanent residency. An ambivalent relationship to being a Tamil and an artist emerged when he presented a recent canvas. He had begun this particular work at the same time as I had recorded his actions. With this piece, Hari further points at a close connection between creating and destroying. Hari  I always feel strange when I try to define myself as an artist, primarily I’m a writer and I use art to think through certain things . . . This is one of the pieces I’m working on at the moment. It’s not finished yet but I’ll try to finish it and will probably destroy it after. I started working with it with Anna. I don’t know, when I work I think through a lot of things and I’ve noticed that I’m interested in red and yellow which are the colours of Tamil nationalism, and I’m interested in the concepts rather than the colour. I’ve made cuts here, and then I was stitching as if it was a wound, but then I worked more on it, it moved from being a wound into something else, it became more about colours. And this morning I thought of putting a home here, like in a children’s drawing. A home and a coconut tree and a flower, like a little child’s flower and then . . . But I will probably destroy it afterwards . . . It will give me a room to think through what I’m going to write and especially at the moment I’m working on something related to memory and history. It’s a paper. To think about those concepts, it helps a lot. Especially when I’m stitching, I think a lot about it. Why am I choosing this colour, why I’m doing this, I wring with a lot of things in my mind. Basically this is what it’s about for me. Yeah, and I take photographs. And again with photographs I take [them] of certain things that I’m interested in, that’s according to the current interest, like, if I’m interested in memory I would do something of that, or if it’s about emptiness I’ll look for that. Sabes  So what about this destroying, why? Aruntha  Yeah, especially the wound and the stitching . . . Sabes  It’s really disturbing, the cuts and scars . . . Anushiya  But do you destroy the photographs as well, or?

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Hari  I keep the photographs because I like them, but with this I don’t see the point because I don’t like it. It’s not intended for sharing. I kind of do it and then I go on to write about it, it’s more of an aiding process for me. Reginald  There is an interesting thing about documentation of those stories . . . As you’re thinking through, even if it’s just for you that’s fine. But if I were in your place I would find it interesting to hide it away, maybe putting it away so you can come back and look through it because it might spark something . . . Then, in twenty years’ time, from your thought from where you were then. When staying in art school, one of the things we were always given is, taught to do, is to have a work book. And you just put anything and everything in it, and this is just for me a bigger version of it, of a work book . . . Someone like Henry Moore, a lot of the big sculptures that he’s famous for he actually did the drawings for them twenty-­five years previously but never did the work. It was only until he had the skills and was able to do it he then did the pieces. I don’t know, I just think it would be interesting for yourself, for an older you . . . Hari’s piece consisted of abstract shapes and they evoked memories from Sri Lanka among the present artists. Reginald suggested a fish he had seen at the Jaffna market, and then their interpretation of Hari’s abstraction shifted, during much laughter and articulations of sharing, into a pannadai. They talked about how all parts of the Palmyra tree (not just the pannadai) have benefits, and its central position as an identifier of Tamil culture, how it is a part of them. It reoccurs in titles of songs, poems and books. There is a saying which links the character of the Palmyra pannadai with a certain personality, and at the same time articulates an ironic approach to the much beloved tree among the present artists. Krishnarajah  It’s like a filter! Mostly we use pannadai to treat the toddy [made of the sap from the same tree] in our village, to remove the small ants and stuff, you know? Aruntha  All the good stuff goes down, and you keep the bad. So if you’re a pannadai, you keep all the bad stuff. Krishnarajah  If you’re holding all the waste stuff with you, you are a pannadai! Anushiya  You know, one should try to be a good person, but a pannadai means a person who is not good! Krishnarajah and Aruntha had to discuss in Tamil and then translate to English to get the saying rightly translated for me, and also for Reginald. He was born in London in the 1970s, a period when diaspora parents like his own rarely conveyed their first language to the next generation.

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Aruntha has organized her presentation into a folder with photographs of her paintings and drawings. She begins by showing images of Palmyra leaves. One was drawn during another recording session when I recorded her working in a park surrounded by completely different kinds of trees, and a longer series is from her determined artistic and feminist practices in Sri Lanka. Aruntha, like Anushiya, had to take private classes as there was no formal art education available in Tamil from 1956, when the government proclaimed Sinhala as the official language, to 2010, when a fine art degree programme was established at Jaffna University. Aruntha was trained by Appuhami Mark, the main person in proliferating modern art in the Jaffna region. During 1986, Aruntha and two other female artists trained in his group organized their own exhibition at Jaffna University. This was a remarkable effort in an environment dominated by men, and by the armed conflict between the Sinhala government and the LTTE. The artists were critical of the war, but had to be careful to not point at a particular side. At the time, LTTE held temporary control of Jaffna and had established a de facto government. They had established an art and culture unit which became the first government-­level support for art in the Tamil parts of Sri Lanka. But they only promoted propagandistic works that depicted Tamil war heroes and Sinhala oppression. During our workshop, Aruntha focused on her current work. Aruntha  When I moved here, I completely stopped making war paintings, because I thought . . . It’s sad doing it, and also I’m not the person to do that because I’m safe here and just enjoying other things . . . So, the memories from late 70s and early 80s [before the conflict escalated and militarized] started to come back. I wanted to keep the memories and recall the nice old Jaffna. This painting is one part of it: my mum and us five girls in a line up to have our hair combed in the early morning . . . That was a ritual thing at home. /. . ./ Most of my paintings are related to women. When you [Sabes] were showing that age attending picture, that’s one of my . . . I have questions about it . . . Those ceremonies, why are they doing it and what’s the purpose? This [painting] shows the decorating of a woman . . . And this is about questions of women and her status, she’s waiting for a customer, or whatever . . . There are other sides of a woman’s life as well. Aruntha has used her paintings to raise questions about the everyday lives of Tamil women, particularly related to her experiences growing up within the Vellala caste in Jaffna. Her questions criticise norms such as the ritual walk around the tulasi plant to get a good husband, restrictions in public space, and denial of friendship across caste memberships. She has also painted women in situations of mutual support, interacting across a fence between two gardens and on the thinnai, the street-facing veranda common in older Tamil

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FIGURE 8.2   Aruntha Ratnaraj shows her pastel drawing of two women in intimate friendship across borders based on caste. Hari Rajaledchumy, Reginald A. Aloysius and K. Krishnarajah pay close attention while Sabes Sugunasabesan and Anushiya Sundaralingam sits on the left of my photographing body.

houses. Since Aruntha left Sri Lanka in 1995 to marry into the diaspora in London, she has left her feminist activism behind. Aruntha  The life in Jaffna. Which I miss! This one I don’t know if you can figure it out, it’s a nap, the afternoon nap. Our mums were lucky really, they didn’t go to work. Although they did lots of work. But they also had a time to rest in the afternoon, so this is the afternoon nap. And this one, with the chat at the fence . . . Anushiya  Yes, I remember our house. Outside we had this big lane and after lunch all the women came out and talked . . . Aruntha  Yes, so the counselling was easily done. Now we are so stressed and depressed. Why? Because these sort of SMALL things, we are missing it . . . If you had a problem in your house, the mum, the lady of the house, would go out at the front of the house, they were chatting and then it [the problem] was finished! They could easily forget the problem, as these are simple and small matters, and they [woman neighbours] were listening! /. . ./ The thinnai life, it’s so interesting and so peaceful. And the kolam is part of it as well . . .

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Anna  When you make the faces without the features, do you also imagine yourself in that face, or is it more like mother and grandmother? Aruntha  Mother and grandmother. I didn’t have the chance to live this life, it’s about Jaffna women’s lives. In Jaffna I was only a little girl so I couldn’t. But I’m longing for that life, I WISH I had had that life. /. . ./ This [painting] is our thinnai, I can remember those pillars, and even the design, they have a relationship with me. I lived in a naachuvara house [brick house with an inner courtyard]. The house is still standing, in Vannarpannai, but we are losing it, my sisters want to sell it . . . /. . ./ Now I’ve stopped to work with the political issues. I moved here, and suddenly stopped that. No political view or issues now. It’s just the cultural thing, to save the culture, the heritage. Now we think that we have to SAVE something . . . Sabes  Yes, the memories . . . Aruntha  That memories should come back in life . . . Sabes  Do you also think about bringing it on to the next generation? Aruntha  Yeah! My children they speak good Tamil . . . And my daughter says: We don’t have a land . . . We don’t have any relatives [left in Jaffna]. That’s the sad thing. So to visit Sri Lanka we are going to be tourists. For both me and my husband . . . that’s sad. Reginald  I don’t think we are that different, I think we all are very related. Aruntha  YES! Sabes  Yeah . . . Reginald  Even though I’m of course less first hand, almost as if I was stealing, not your memories but the ideas and the notions you are talking about. I think everyone [of us] is related . . . Oh, we probably all are RELATED, everybody is from Jaffna! Krishnarajah  Well, I think I’m different regarding these things. Aruntha  Oh! Wait until you come up, you are related to us! Krishnarajah  No I’m sure, I’m not worried about my country or . . . I didn’t lose anything, I don’t miss anything! I feel like that. I’m living here, I’ve travelled around the world . . . That’s true, I’m not worried about my family either [the social norms, what the relatives will think]. /. . ./ I never worry about anything. I am a happy person, always. Don’t think that I’m a selfish man, I am helping as much as I can, but that’s a different thing. I am enjoying the world.

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Next, Reginald begins with the difficulties of full time commitment to contemporary art within the Tamil communities, an issue I will come back to below. He has brought two artworks which he handles gently due to its shiny varnished surface sensitive to fingertip marks. Reginald  My work has been very internally based, based around biological aspects of your identity, more physical, and I made HUGE large paintings, the size of walls, when I was at Ruskin in Oxford, kind of messy really. They were very gestural, it was very action, loud colour. Then I kind of lost my way a bit, I was doing the same kind of thing for many years. When I went into the masters at Kingston, it was a research-­based programme whereby you didn’t actually produce any work, you did studies, you were trying to learn about your journey between A and B, and not have a B, you wouldn’t actually do any work. So for two years I just kind of laid tools down and didn’t make any finished pieces. And it was then when we went to, when I started to figure things out about where I was going and who I was, and then my life was going through lots of changes anyway, I was getting married and I was starting to think about having children and started to think about myself as a Tamil, born and bred in Britain, and other Tamils and there was an influx of other Tamils, and as you were saying about memories and passing it on, this is actually coming from a different angle, talking about cultures disappearing as a result of diasporas moving away, and that we’re moving maybe too fast. This work is two images put together, this is a study so you can’t really see it that well but if you look at the website there are big paintings where you’ll see. So there are two images, one is of a temple. A lot of the one’s I’ve done more recently are more in Tamil Nadu [in India] than in Sri Lanka, because obviously it’s harder to get to Tamil . . . and you know . . . and there [in Sri Lanka] are not that many larger nicer temples. And the jungle aspect is taken, I’ve taken all of these pictures, of jungle areas near to the temples. So this is Mahabalipuram, it’s one of the shore temples, and then this is further back inland; some of the jungle. I put the two of them together, very basic, very simple, and I have to admit it, this was slightly a mistake – but it was a happy mistake. As much as good art sometimes can be. Reginald describes the details of his working process but most of this is omitted here as he does not want to share it publicly, except for the scarring of the surface which is part of the final acts. Reginald  The white lines here are actually scaffolding of buildings being built in the West. The jungle is kind of a metaphor . . . If the temples are the

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cultural aspects of what I’m talking about, then the jungle is the metaphor for the encroachment of that, of a society taking over another culture. And the white lines are sort of, I’ve scratched them into the piece, so once I’ve made those lines I cannot do anything about them. You can’t repair it, I can’t go back. And that’s done with a scalpel. Very fast, very easy, all new buildings being built in the west, in England, in Europe, in America. And the coloured lines are actually deeper scars that I’ve made and then enamel painted in, which are airline route maps. So these are all airlines that are leaving Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, going out west. This is called LH 759 so it’s a Lufthansa flight that leaves from Colombo going to Dusseldorf. So again, the scarring is made and there’s nothing you can do about it. And again, it talks about the idea that once you’ve changed inside, once you’ve changed your culture by having moved away, there is no easy way of going back, it’s never going to happen, it’s just too difficult. It’s the same with the physical aspect of the work. I scratch it, and I cannot take it away. If it’s incorrectly made, if I made a mistake, there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s discarded. Which is quite scary . . . This is a small piece, but the larger pieces take two months, every day, Monday to Friday, eight in the morning to five at night, then you don’t want to screw it up. Then that’s two months of . . . But hey, that’s what the work is! This [the second work] is a slightly different piece where I’ve been practising about, I don’t know, something I’ve learned about Tamil chaos . . . There’s an order to Tamil way of thinking, but it’s a little chaotic, I think we can all admit that. And again it’s the idea of dispersing, as Anushiya you said when we were outside, about that my sister’s here, my brother’s there, we’ve got relatives ALL OVER the place and I think that’s very, very sad. It’s the way it is and people are looking for work in different places . . . But it’s quite damaging on our society . . . Unless, we pass on our cultural ideas, a Tamil sentience, what Tamils are . . . Anushiya  So this has got the leaves as well? Reginald  Yeah, I’m sure there are some Palmyra leaves in there somewhere. Anushiya  You know, he [Reginald] was born here and he is now influenced by there, I was born there and . . . Even though you know I do bring some, my work is more about here. We’ve crossed this thread, but I’ve started to . . . Reginald  Yeah you’ve crossed back . . . Sabes  It’s very close to me . . . I like the layers . . . Layers of thought, physical layers.

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FIGURE 8.3   Reginald S. Aloysius mixed media work WY374, which presents Tamil temples embedded in vegetation incised by modern scaffolding and airline routes, 2012. The piece is 90 × 120 cm.

Reginald  There’s also something which I think is, it’s certainly not a Tamil thing. It just happens to be that I’m a British Tamil and that’s why I’m doing this work. But – I think it’s a very transferrable idea, there are a lot of communities around the world who for whatever reason are moving around, it’s an idea that a lot of people, a lot of cultures, can identify with. Whether you are from the South American jungle and you’re leaving, moving away to Brazil and Sau Paulo looking for work, and your identity is being lost, or whether you’re coming from Syria or wherever . . . Sabes  Yeah . . . It’s only Tamil because you are Tamil. Reginald  Exactly, yeah. I remember I was being in my course and reading, about the explorer Wade Davis, and he was talking about languages how they were disappearing by the day, and he talked about an Ethnosphere. We talk about a biosphere but he talked about the ethnosphere and how languages and cultures, you know, keep hold of the human kind, and by losing all of that so quickly, we are destroying it as much as the biosphere is destroying the weather. We are destroying our souls, losing languages, losing ideas, the way we used to do things, our morals and way of being. It made me start to think a lot. Sabes  Something came to me when being in Malaysia. Those people left Sri Lanka around the 1920s, they are carrying on lots of things, the family

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values, the religious things. The language they’re losing, they’ve lost it, but a lot of things they carry on. My uncle he went to work in Malaysia in the late 1940s, he married there in 1952. There were not many Tamils there, but they had a temple, everybody went out in the morning, blessing the house, with pujas and things. I don’t do it, but it’s something, believe it or not it doesn’t matter, there are certain rituals that keep certain things together, that remind them . . . . Reginald  Mmm. I’ve thought a lot about this as well, because my wife is English. But she’s very supportive, about our son having Tamil name, and make sure he learns a lot of Tamil. She’s very supportive of our culture . . . Even though it was quite distressing, having his head shaved in Madurai [in Tamil Nadu], I mean that was quite a big thing, ‘cause he was about eighteen months old . . . so, he was screaming away and . . . but it made me think a lot about whether . . . when we got married it made me think about kids and therefore how they will play, I think so many of us . . . My generation, who were born here, you DEFINITELY don’t speak Tamil, and if that’s then going to continue . . . We don’t know, and therefore that’s gone. The language, and then the culture will disappear as quickly as well . . . Anushiya  I just want to say, you know, even though my work with dresses might look like it’s Westernized, but Anna knows, I’m using saris, sari threads, so still I’m bringing some of the sari into it, I love the fabric, I LOVE sari and I WEAR sari sometimes, so I’m bringing in some of what you are doing, what you miss, what also comes with the Western and . . . Reginald  I think people should start wearing it every day actually! Reginald and Anushiya promote increased wearing of sari, joking about the reactions in streets without Tamil residents that are particularly prominent in Belfast. I know that there are various opinions in the room and interfere by asking if the others agree. Aruntha and Krishnarajah are hesitant, while Hari’s distinct point of view raises a considerable tension in the discussion. Hari  It’s interesting how you mention ethnosphere and culture as important to save. But I see glorification of culture. I’m someone who really likes the idea of the destruction of that culture, I don’t like it at all, and I’ve always liked to do the opposite. Because, whenever I see these images, they are beautiful and I like sari, I like wearing sari as well, it’s fun, beautiful and everything. But I see it as six yards of oppression as well, it’s imposed. When we glorify these households and these kinds of things, what about the Dalits and THEIR customs!? They obviously see this as oppression,

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and for them the naachuvara [house] is highly inequitable, they live in slums. I always approach it in such manners, I don’t really think it should be there as a . . . you know, I’m fine with the destruction of it. If there’s a defacement of that culture, I will go: Yeah deface it! Reginald  I’m not suggesting for one minute that you retain everything, because no culture is completely right. What I’m saying is that there ought to be a debate around, don’t get rid of everything so quickly, don’t be too quick to let it all go. I’m not necessarily saying that you should be exactly as you were, like you were a thousand years ago, hundred years ago or five hundred years ago. It’s just that everything is moving so fast . . . I mean, admittedly, even Western cultured people are saying, you know, year to year everything is changing so fast with technology, that we’re moving faster and faster away from everything that we knew. I mean the world is SO different from only twenty years ago, you know when I left university, it’s SO different, from technology to the way people interact, to the fact that NO ONE communicates in the way they did before. The idea that emailing is awful because, you know it’s great in some respect, but, the language is appalling . . . and you CAN’T tell people’s tone. So people end up to not really communicating in the right way, as a result of not understanding the tone, or because there are such short sentences. So that’s how communication is going. You [Arunthathi] talked about when women meet in the lane and problems are sorted out and how that happens less and less, and more and more people I know are going to shrinks and going to doctors. When maybe, we just need a few more opportunities to talk, you know. BUT, ABSOLUTELY, I one hundred percent agree. I mean I don’t know so much about whether a sari is thought of . . . as part of . . . some social group. Is it a questioned thing? I don’t know enough about that to be fair, so I couldn’t say. But I don’t think . . . I mean, that you retain ALL of it, it’s just . . . I think that, yes we need to move along cause every culture does, cause actually Hinduism as a religion is very much about that life is constantly changing and that you have to go along with the changes. BUT I understand it as that you don’t have to get rid of absolutely everything. Anushiya  I think in our culture, for our generation, we were there and then all of a sudden we LOST all of that, and now we are here, now we miss . . . when here, in this culture, it’s all changing in that way . . . For us we just completely lost everything and then something . . . So now we are trying to get what we miss. Sabes  I agree with Hari in most respects, but, culture is general, I see it as a kind of ordering, it gives us a kind of framework to do things, how to relate, all that. Everybody, every community needs some kind of framework,

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call it culture or whatever. We talk about the matter of disappearing, and also radical thoughts want to destroy it, but then there is no . . . We have to be careful about not having any, you know we will end up with no order or framework. That’s my view. In terms of art, individually, every piece of work, everybody is going through their own process, they have to do it. Looking at that alone, we cannot say that that negates Dalits or any other . . . Hari  I don’t suggest that at all! That is our mutual process, and I value that, and there are beautiful saris, don’t get me wrong . . . I also enjoy the connection . . . Aruntha  We can represent ourselves only, I don’t want to make any propaganda . . . I know the Dalits is an issue and I might want to paint something like that but it’s like . . . I’m just fooling others because I don’t know anything about it and I just try to tell like that . . . That’s why I stopped making war paintings . . . because I don’t have the authority to do that. Anushiya  So for me I . . . people asked me as well when I was in art college: You have a great subject matter, why don’t you do work with it [the war]? But I didn’t . . . I said I’m not there, I don’t feel it . . . Aruntha  But we WERE there, we were doing it . . . because we were witnessing it . . . Anushiya  But I didn’t want to make those paintings, I didn’t want to do it. So for me, I sometimes do nice things or happy things. Because – I don’t want to go there! These words hold roars of pain, which almost can be felt in the room. But this was not the moment to articulate the dread of violence, and Krishnarajah brought us back into solid material engagements. He presents himself through lots of photographs; as sketches, completed works, and as documentation of paintings and three dimensional pieces. He shows his early figurative and often organic sculptures from the 1970s, made in clay, wood and coconut. The others joyfully make the pannadai link again. Krishnarajah is modest about his practices and holds that it is superfluous to conceptualize the works, they are about texture, colour, contrast, shapes, feelings, movements. Krishnarajah  I did these types of sculptures . . . And my critics said: ‘You are copying from Henry Moore!’ I was crying all the time, I didn’t know anything about any Henry Moore. You couldn’t get any Google then, nothing . . . But afterwards, I was so happy! /. . ./ When I was doing the sculptures, I was enjoying all the time, you know the curves and the . . . moves and . . . That’s the only thing – I am an artist! I wanted to be an artist – Like that.

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Anushiya  Where did you study? Krishnarajah  At the University of Fine Arts in Kalanya. Anushiya  In India? Aruntha  No, Sri Lanka! And was it in Tamil medium or in English medium? Krishnarajah  SINHALA medium, you can’t believe it! The first three years in the evenings, we had to learn Sinhalese . . . It was for four years . . . We STRUGGLED a lot with it, all the time . . . Aruntha  So you had to do all the lectures in Sinhala medium?! Krishnarajah  Yeah, in Sinhala medium. After the third year only, one of our lectures at Jaffna University, who is a doctor now, you know Kailasapathy? He helped us to arrange lectures in Tamil. The last year we were so happy! /. . ./ These are my recent paintings . . . actually since the last twenty-­five years, I’ve skipped the figurative . . . I’m concentrated on my feelings . . . And colour! Sabes  This is . . . But you don’t like talking about it? Krishnarajah  I don’t like to talk, but you can talk! Reginald  What are you thinking when you are painting? Krishnarajah  I’m only in the moment . . . I’m enjoying different things. Reginald  They are very gestural. Krishnarajah  Yeah, yeah, that’s it, there’s no more story for it. Reginald  How much time do you have to work on these? Krishnarajah  Sometimes it takes five minutes or ten minutes, sometimes it takes two to three days . . . One night I did . . . For the whole night I didn’t sleep . . . I was just doing, doing, doing, doing and completed almost fifteen pieces! You can’t believe that, and I don’t know! I couldn’t stop . . . I never retouch them, just do it directly, work fast. So for five, six years I’ve never retouched a piece . . . Artistic practice is also a form of community work in Krishnarajah’s life. He has co-­organized a short Tamil film festival in London for seven years and presented works at gatherings with the global network of diaspora scholars engaged in Tamil literature. He got to know Hari through this network, and together with the photographer Tamilini Jothilingam they formed the group re:start.3

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Krishnarajah shows photographs from their excursion to Stratford upon Avon. Although not mentioned during the workshop, Krishnarajah was Mark’s first student in Jaffna. This supportive encounter with modernism evoked the aim to become a full-time artist, and he left for Paris in 1983 and continued to London soon after. He followed the rapidly escalating conflict in Sri Lanka from a distance, and made black and white drawings of particular incidents. Krishnarajah  This drawing is from ninety-­three I think. Do you know what happened in Voodor? One old woman was raped by the [Sinhalese] army, at that time I did this . . . Recently somebody made a copy and used it in New Delhi, you know about the gang rape. They used it for the posters at the following rally.

FIGURE 8.4   K. Krishnarajah’s drawing of an elder Tamil woman raped by the Sinhala army. The drawing has been disseminated through magazines and used in riots for women’s rights in Sri Lanka as well as India. The drawing is 30 × 20 cm.

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Some of Krishnarajah’s drawing has been published in magazines produced within the literary diaspora network, such as Alai and Siritharan, and further disseminated to Tamils in India and when possible to Sri Lanka. Hari has seen the Vodoor woman also reproduced on a poster at an LTTE rally against the violence committed by the Sinhalese army. When we discuss these, Anushiya makes a sudden realisation: ‘Now I know you, I have seen you work!’ Extremely pleased, she tells us that she probably still has cut outs of his works from the magazines in her family house in Jaffna. Krishnarajah made a large painting of the expulsion of Muslims in the Jaffna area in 1990, which he showed shortly after along with a few other works at Tom Allen, a gallery run by black diaspora artists in London. He says he has given away the painting and has no document of it. The others are very concerned about what they perceive as Krishnarajah lack of attendance to his works. They accept that he does not care about copyright if his works are used for good causes at political rallies and gives them away to people who like them, but they argue that he should show his work to the world, make exhibitions and publish books. But Krishnarajah is not bothered: Krishnarajah  No . . . You know all the Tamil writers and poets, everybody, they are my friends, I do it for them. That’s my way of helping the community, I can do only these things. After a while of small talk and discussions at TCC on the necessity to gather again to further develop this supportive platform, we are exhausted and the community centre is about to close. Krishnarajah and Aruntha set off back home to their families while the rest of us are joined by the young photographer Ezhilojan Jeyakumar at the time interacting in our periphery, and we continue to talk over a meal.

Relational and epistemological effects The workshop engendered a sense of relational aesthetics through the artists’ handling and description of their own and each other’s pieces and ways of working. Relational aesthetics has been emphasized in participatory art projects, and as outlined in Chapter 2, Nicolas Bourriaud established this term in reference to the effect of art events which engage people in collaborative social action (2002). The workshop further included elements of what in anthropological methodology is described as photo elicitation, when photographic images are presented to research subjects in order to evoke memories and discussions on cultural phenomena. Importantly, our gathering planted some of the seeds that grew into the project Migratory Images where

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the participants, including myself, began a collaboration of posting a series of our artworks to each other. Each batch would respond to the preceding one, and the receiver should keep one work of the sender to be used in coming dialogues. This idea was partly inspired by a project Sabes developed with his collaborators at the London Independent Photography group. It was further related to The One Year Drawing Project, an exchange of artistic and ideological viewpoints between four Sri Lankan artists who sent drawings to one another during the intensification of the war in 2005 to 2007. The artists respectively belong to the three conflicting ethnic groups and their reciprocal work was an anti-­war project that presented an alternative to the uniformity required by the Sri Lankan nationalism (Ismail 2009; Pereira 2009). The video work intensified the sense of overlap between our collaborative investigations and opened new windows towards the artists’ real and imagined movements between a new here and what they, and in Reginald’s case the parents, physically left behind. When I recorded Aruntha sitting on a park bench under large beech trees that appeared to dominate the setting by their wide branches and the loud wind moving through them, she chose to draw the leaves of a Palmyra tree. Seemingly at ease in the English park, she was simultaneously in Jaffna. Exploring neighbourhoods of decaying buildings with Hari, we suddenly decided to record him breaking off loose plaster as a figure of paining embodied memories. In another setting, water in the streets turned red due to a distorted white balance and this sequence evoked narratives of Jaffna’s blood-­filled streets. Somewhere in the process, Krishnarajah’s modest approach and current lack of interest in conveying his art in public motivated him to not participate in the video work, but we continued to meet and look at his paintings. Three of the artists were keen on involving related literature. Hari read a prose text on being in exile, Aruntha a poem on women’s work, and Sabes contributed with the poem Transient Home which he had written for the video. We jointly decided to title the full piece Making Home – with five artists in the UK. The collaboration was less significant during the editing, but Hari and Ezhilojan spent many hours discussing the process in front of my computer screen. All participating artists were consulted after the first five minutes were completed and we watched this sequence together. The full 35-minute piece was completed several months later, after my additional work in Jaffna (described further below), and sent to the artists by post for comments before I showed it in public. Except for the replacement of a minor clip where a garment was used in a manner that could disassociate with the chosen community, the presented version was approved. The workshop and the recording enhanced my understanding of how the artists use and explore materials and places in shifting movements between memories, the present moment and their imagination. Our oscillations between creative making and reflexive discussion clarified how the artists

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FIGURE 8.5   Excerpt from the video Making Home – with five artists based in the UK which connects Hari Rajaledchumy’s canvas cutting with the sense of being placeless and unfamiliar in his diasporic existence, 2012.

immerse themselves in things, fabrics and landscapes through their art practice. The materials embodied direct or indirect connections to the artists’ background environment in Jaffna, and constituted a way of coming to terms with their multiple belonging.

Between criticism and longing People, things and places are mutually constitutive, and their relationship varies according to historical and cultural contexts. As described in Chapters 2 and 3, Hindu understandings of boundaries between subject and object acknowledge a high degree of permeability where substances move and transform and where corporeal dimensions of aesthetics are emphasized. Relations between people and their material environments have been further investigated in contexts of mobility and migration (Miller 2008; Svašek 2012). Diasporic existence located in unfamiliar places can enforce the emotional affect of things, where a gift from a relative living in the homeland might evoke encouraging memories as well as arouse painful homesickness. Two recent studies of the Tamil diaspora in Norway points at healing aspects of embodied ritual engagements with objects from or related to Sri Lanka (Bruneland 2015; Grønseth 2012). Anne Sigfrid Grønseth focuses on cooking utensils used to make food for images of the deities and the handling of blessed amulets and strings tied around body parts, and she proposes that these everyday practices produce a sense of well-­being and being at ease (2012). They strengthen the self in an insecure situation of migration and flight and enable close connections to the Tamil homeland and diaspora members residing in other parts of the world. Links are made with the past but the openness of the objects further allows imaginations of the future. Stine Bruneland analyses the annual re-­enactment of the Heroes’ Day, the commemoration of the LTTE fighters who died for an independent Tamil

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nation (2015). The event takes place in many cities hosting the Tamil diaspora, and large halls are transformed through the Tamil Eelam flag, decorations in its colours yellow and red, and walls filled with photographs of lost Tiger fighters. The centre stage consists of an imitation of the warrior cemeteries in Sri Lanka, the memorials Sabes earlier in this chapter describes as bulldozed because only the victorious Sinhalese are allowed to have commemoratory monuments in Sri Lanka. At the event, people participate by placing lit candles at the portraits, listening to Tiger songs and a recorded speech by the former leader Prabhakaran. According to Bruneland, the structure and aesthetics of the commemoration enables a transcendence of spatial difference which place the participants in Sri Lanka and momentarily evoke a shared belonging and feeling at ease (2015). During my own visit at a Heroes’ Day remembrance in London, the experience was overwhelming through its size and convincing sensuous display of the Tamil cause and plight. After having been searched at the entrance, all visitors were endowed with the fragrant yellow and red Tamil Eelam flower imported for the event. Both cases above emphasize how multisensorial aesthetic experiences of handling objects create positive emotional proximity to the place of origin. Like the artists I have interacted with, their embodied engagements in Tamil materials are founded in the aforementioned Hindu ideas of porous boundaries between people and things. However, as exemplified in the workshop dialogue, the artists point at a much more complex and ambiguous relationship to Tamil belonging. Their practices concern constant shifts between here and there, creative as well as destructive acts and emotions, denials as well as embraces of being Tamil. The artists have a critical and reflexive approach which separates them from the singular notion of Tamil identity and homeland presented by the accounts from Norway. While there is increasing research on global and diaspora art through an ethnographically situated perspective that examines cultural forces at play and relations between the artist’s embodied self and native place, their analyses point at the completed artwork and its subject matter rather than the process of making it (see for example Ankori 2003; Fillitz 2013; Wainwright 2012). However, the edited volumes by Arnd Schneider and Chris Wright provide a variety of approaches which opens new ways of understanding diaspora art practices. For example, Elizabeth Edward’s account of Mohini Chandra’s work on Fiji-Indian identity presents how the artist investigates social uses of family photography through extended fieldwork, interviewing and archival research (2006). Chandra explores how the diaspora has maintained its belonging to a global network and a space both here and there through material practices of photography, and she reconstitutes this connection in her own ways of working. This reflexive and auto-­critical method and following photographic installations are aligned with the anthropological thinking that blurs the

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boundaries between home and field and that counters the idea of culture as a bounded group fixed in one place (Edwards 2006b). Edward’s analysis can be linked to Tim Ingold’s emphasis on the process of making in order to enable an understanding of art as part of social and cultural lives (2011, 2013), as elaborated in the introduction of this book. My collaboration with the Tamil artists further confirms that their investigative artistic processes have transformational effects and are central to a thorough awareness of their sense of multiple belongings. Connections with memories from Sri Lanka and imaginations of possible futures emerge in their shaping of materials, but are at the same time critically scrutinized and renegotiated in relation to current positions. The artists’ exploratory thinking through making is embedded in constant shifts between longing and criticism. The concept uprootings/regroundings has been developed by Sara Ahmed et al to highlight that the processes of homing and migrating are intertwined, and notions of here and there are blurred in diasporic existence (2003). This position criticizes the linear thinking of home as a fixed place of origin and movement as emerging only when this place is left behind and migration begins. Ahmed et al argues that to be uprooted does not mean freedom from home and ground, and that grounded homes are always in a state of flux. Dwelling and mobility, stillness and transformation are not in opposition but rather depend on each other, and they have affective, embodied, cultural, and political aspects. This rethinking of what home and migration mean brings us closer to the practices of the Tamil artists. Uprootings/regroundings can be used quite literally to describe Anushiya’s work. She has developed an embodied relationship with the large banyan tree in the middle of the neighbourhood where she grew up, and has come to identify her diaspora life with the properties of this tree. They share the capacity of the aerial prop roots that by time connect with new ground and develop more trunks in an ever-­expanding movement, and Anushiya constantly returns to this process in her art making. She works through the uprooting by ripping old saris into pieces of ribbon, then she recrafts them into dresses and these figures become regrounded through long roots constituted by another set of sari ribbons. The making of roots and trunks that reconnect with old and new grounds forms a large part of Anushiya’s time in the studio, and she has also used bangles from London and bamboo from Sri Lanka to create related pieces and installations. The works of Hari and Reginald further illuminates that there is no linear movement of making new objects from existing materials and substances. Objects are destroyed and transformed into materials and reshaped into something different. The entanglements of destructive and creative acts can be understood as a method to critically work through their ambivalent relations to Tamil and British ways of being. The stabbing of the canvas Hari presented at the workshop held anger and pain towards Tamil as well as Sinhala

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FIGURE 8.6   Anushiya Sundaralingam’s model for an installation at the later exhibition Re Root, presented at the Cresent Arts Centre, Belfast, 2014. The model is 120 cm high.

nationalism, which both invaded his life and home in Jaffna. When he was little, his mother carried him on her head across a lake every night to escape aerial attacks by the Sinhala army. She found security and shelter inside a church on the other side from their own vulnerable village. In the following years, Hari was displaced thirteen times into refugee camps in Sri Lanka. When he finally managed to leave for London, he was also escaping the LTTE youth militia which aimed for his life due to outspoken criticism of Tamil nationalism. Yet, Hari approached his childhood environment by choosing

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threads in the Tamil Eelam colours yellow and red in his laborious mending of the canvas cuts, and again turned away by making the completed object burn. While no place in Sri Lanka is home to Hari and it is unclear when it ceased to exist as such, Reginald turns to Tamil places of origin in search for his own sense of belonging. He has felt a loss of intimate proximity since his visits from London to cousin Anushiya ceased due to the escalating war, and as his diaspora parents did not pass on the language. This loss has been reworked through travelling and photographing in South India, and meticulous engage­ ments in the studio building up and rubbing down surfaces of his pieces, and the final scalpel cutting which creates airline routes and edifices that pains old architecture and plantations. The thoroughness of Reginald’s practices and the many hours spent on each piece is a means to reconstitute his relation to Tamil culture, and to counteract what he perceives as modernity’s generally too rapid violations of non-Western cultures as well as migrants’ too fast adaptions as they move into diasporic states of being. There is a sense of nostalgia in Reginald’s approach, but at the same time he is critical of the Tamil ideals which excludes contemporary art practice as a possible career. Upward mobility is crucial in the hierarchical caste and class structure, and the future position of one’s family is secured through occupations within medicine, law and finance. Engagements in art forms that are considered to be based in European rather than Tamil traditions are further disowned by the aforementioned nationalist ideology, which is partly a response to colonial degradations in South Asian art but also its elevation of the Brahmin and north Indian Sanskrit derived languages in relation to the Dravidian south.4 Art forms like poetry, drama and singing based on ancient Tamil language are higher valued than architecture or religious sculpture. The struggle against colonial and Sinhala oppression that has reinforced the need to articulate Tamil uniqueness and practices that amalgamate numerous styles has been deemed as impure. Tamil values are reproduced on the marriage market, and incorrect behaviour reduces the chances of a suitable spouse for oneself as well as one’s children. This makes it difficult for the artists to disseminate their work among Tamils. If they want to live on their art, they become dependent on the British art market which requires works with a focus on Tamil ethnicity in order to allow their presence. The artists have challenged and negotiated with these two markets and their respective emotional pressures in individual ways. Reginald did not complete his degree in economics and after years of challenging the expectations of the art market by distancing his works from any visible connections to his Tamil background, changes in his personal life brought forth another level of resistance where investigations and presentations of his background has become the sincerest way to move forward. His art education provided an essential network linked to the British art market and his audience and buyers are steadily growing. It is his aim to

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show the Tamil communities that contemporary artist is a viable occupation, and that the next generation should not need to be excluded from the marriage market the way he was. Aruntha’s situation deviates from Reginald’s in relation to both markets. She was a recognized artist and feminist at Jaffna University, with support from her parents who belonged to a group of intellectuals open to exchanges with practices and values beyond the Tamil region. Her last exhibition before she married and migrated to England took place at the women’s conference in Beijing in 1995. Her elder sisters had moved through similar trajectories and Aruntha knew what was expected. In her new environment, given a different social role in a different place, individual well-­being became closely intertwined with that of her expanding family. But she has maintained some of her relationship with art and art practice through courses and local groups outside the Tamil communities. Since her two children have become adolescents, Aruntha has been able to negotiate more time to draw and paint. However, it has never been an option to challenge and hereby risk the family’s position on the marriage market and this low profile has disqualified an approach towards the British art market. The art group in High Wycombe she participates in is situated in a white middle-class context, and like the professional art scene, it has asked for Tamilness in her contributions to their occasional local exhibitions. Aruntha shares Reginald’s aims to reach the diaspora but in a quite different manner. She addresses young Tamils who never experienced the peaceful life she remembers from her childhood in Jaffna. Instead, many of them have inherited their parents’ war traumas. Aruntha intends to use her painting and thinking through of her own embodied memories of small talk and everyday practices on calm thinnais before the armed conflict to broaden the historical understanding among second and third generations in the diaspora. The work is at the same time a reconnection with her own loss of place and social networks where she momentarily can sense an immersion with the wooden pillars at her former courtyard. Aruntha suggests that this engagement in the past is important for future well-­being, for herself as well as for the Tamil communities. Continuous movements among migrants and refugees in diasporic settings – imaginary and real, across time and place, between here and there, and between uprooting and regrounding – become intensified in artistic practice. The Jewish diaspora artist Lily Markiewicz has investigated these shifts through experiences of placelessness and marginalization linked with inherited holocaust traumas (2007). Based on her artistic and critically reflexive practice, she argues that making and viewing art is enacted through a dialectic process between accommodating and unaccommodating oneself, between homing and losing oneself. The accommodating holds the familiar rather than the safe, and the unaccommodating refers to outer oppression as well as repression of

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certain memories which in their continuation might generate deep scarring. As has been shown, some of the Tamil artists are entangled in this embodied pain. Markiewicz uses her photography and video installations to invite hesitation and ambivalence in the audience’s understanding of place and belonging. She plays with what might be recognized and foreign in order to ‘challenge what we “know”, disturb us and, if only for an instance, unhouse us, dislodge us, loosen us from what has kept us in place, housed us, accommodated us, provided a home’ (Markiewicz ibid: 46). From this sensation of being ungrounded, she suggests that we are enabled to renegotiate the unfamiliar and frightening and subsequently become habituated with the new. The affect that emerges in making and viewing art holds the potential to take us on this non-­linear journey of intertwined movements between the known and the unknown, where different categories may stand in paradoxical relationships and coincide with one another. This framework accommodates the complex contradictions of Hari’s canvas stabbing mended with Tamil Eelam colours and then incinerated with no further traces, of what he wants to remember and what he wants to forget. It houses Anushiya’s denial of engaging with pain and loss, while constantly reconstituting her sense of self through materials from Sri Lanka. It regrounds Krishnarajah’s claimed disinterest in his cultural background while supporting the global diaspora by organizing Tamil film festivals and participating in literary circles. It holds Sabes’ earlier detachment of the conflict in Sri Lanka, his later alignment with claims of Tamil genocide yet disapproving attitude to the methods of LTTE nationalism. It embodies Aruntha’s feminist criticism of the construction of Tamil femininity, as well as her longing for the life of a pre-­war Jaffna woman. It familiarizes Reginald’s losses, challenges and renegotiations of possible ways of being Tamil and/or British. Ultimately, their completed works invite the audience to participate in their thinking through making and renegotiating their own familiarities.

Journey to Jaffna As my fieldwork in the UK came to an end, I realized that I did not know enough about how the materials the artists used to investigate their belonging was incorporated into the social worlds of Jaffna. I wanted to grasp more of what had been physically left behind and incorporate actual environments into the video piece. A journey to Sri Lanka had become inevitable, and I aimed to use both still and video cameras to constitute my own relationship with places and people relevant to the artists’ lives. The initial idea to travel with one of the artists was unfortunately circumvented by our respective schedules. Instead, I planned most of my movements in relation to their relatives and friends.

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FIGURE 8.7   Excerpt from the video Making Home – with five artists based in the UK which concerns the relationship between Aruntha Ratnaraj and her house in Jaffna, connected through the thinnai pillars in her painting of women’s afternoon chats, 2012. The painting is 30 × 40 cm.

However, Aruntha arrived in Colombo just before I had to return and we were able to spend one day together. She was on her way to the naachuvara house in Jaffna, worrying that her sisters’ wish to sell might render this into the last possibility for a physical reconnection. She could once more recharge her relationship with the pillars holding the thinnai roof, although her childhood memories had become further distanced from the decaying state of the building. The absence of the previously vast kin network made Aruntha feel like a foreigner rather than at home, collapsing the separation between tourism and exile. Yet, a few friends remained, for example the Tamil representative of the One Year Drawing Project, Thamotharamillai Sanaathanan. He guided me to Aruntha’s house and the largest banyan tree in Anushiya’s former neighbourhood, and his presence enabled me to record these sites undisturbed. Sanaathanan had established a master programme in fine arts at Jaffna University, and further enhanced my knowledge of how the contemporary art scene on the island develops. The actuality of people still living in shelled houses, prohibited from gathering in streets, under constant surveillance of Sinhala soldiers, the government policy of refurbishing visible surfaces and state infrastructure while refusing support for reconciliation and healing of war traumas, remaining checkpoints at the Jaffna district border while the war officially ended in 2009, the white vans picking up Tamils during night time, and the large number still kept in internal displacement and so called rehabilitation camps, brought new dimensions to my understanding. The Tamil inhabitants of Jaffna lived this post-­war oppression through horrifying experiences of the armed conflict. Further fragments of their fear emerged when works of Mark, Aruntha’s and Krishnarajah’s teacher, were presented to me in a hidden storage. He had made situational drawings that showed consequences of the war, related to the ones Krishnarajah made in exile and presented at the workshop. Produced at a time when there was a lack of photographic material and restrictions on how

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it could be used, these drawings carry documentary value. Many depict people looking towards the sky in anguish, always attentive to the supersonic aircraft and the following bombings. These fighter jets flew faster than the speed of sound and therefore people could not rely on their aural sense to detect the air strikes of the Sinhalese and Indian armies. Survival depended on the skill of routinely looking up. I never lived through war. But the experiences people in the UK and Sri Lanka conveyed, and the traces present in the material environment in Jaffna, brought forth my own family history where my father and grandparents arrived as refugees in Sweden during the Second World War. I unexpectedly had to confront repressed memories at the same time as I investigated the Tamil artists. A new awareness of my inherited traumas of war and flight from Finland and family experiences of being perceived as the Other became entangled in processes of remembering and forgetting closely related to the situation of the Tamil artists. The continuation of my work was partly informed by this new sense of time-­space dialogue between the consequences of the recent war in Sri Lanka and those of the Second World War in Europe. In a previous account, I have discussed the convergence between mine and the artists’ aims and practices through the framework of auto-­ethnography (Laine 2015b). This connection can also be understood through Markiewicz’s proposal of how disturbing encounters in making and viewing art can challenge what we know and remember, and from this unaccommodating position of losing oneself bring us into new forms housing ourselves. During the stay in Jaffna, I became aware of how important artistic practices are in my own efforts of accommodating myself. I commonly use my camera to communicate and create relations in new environments, but this was circumscribed by the presence of Sinhala surveillance. Worrying about aggressive responses if I directed my attention in unwanted directions, I almost withdrew from photographic practices in public. This disturbing encounter of threat reinforced my sense of losing myself and the ability to become habituated. The video material recorded in London where the Tamil artists explore unknown environments through practices of photography and drawing acquired enhanced meaning. It became central in the editing process to form a piece that could convey what it was like to be in the dialectic process of accommodating and unaccommodating oneself through making art. As such, the completed video would also reinforce the viewing of art as having the same effect of dislocating the audience and inviting them into new ways of knowing. Following Markiewicz’s account of diasporic art practice from making to viewing, we arrive at defamiliarization as an artistic strategy of disrupting the ordinary articulated within literature as well as visual arts since the early twentieth century (Danto 1981). Defamiliarization has further been incorporated as a mode of critique in anthropology where unfamiliar cultural practices and

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epistemologies are juxtaposed with Euro-­centric notions of common sense to create awareness of difference (Marcus and Fisher 1986). George Marcus and Michael Fisher argue for a separation between an artistic method which only seeks a momentary effect and the anthropological endeavour where the defamiliarization is a starting point for further investigations and analyses. However, this chapter elucidates how these ways of working have been combined in research on the location of diaspora artists and their simultaneous investigation of their relation to home and belonging.

Art as immersion The contradictory elements in the Tamil artists’ working and thinking processes demonstrate the complexity of diasporic existence where no place is completely solid or secure. Their choice of artistic practice as method to explore their uncertain position entail an intensification. The immersion in making art heightens their awareness and understanding of an embodied sense of belonging and being dislocated. The artists renegotiate the familiar and unfamiliar through their art making and hereby reconstitute themselves as individuals in relation to Tamil as well as British communities. Objects and materials have proven to be significant elements in the artists’ investigations, through their forging of links between places in the artistic processes of housing and losing oneself in the British environment of exile. This confirms the importance of materiality in everyday life, and how materials, people and culture constitute each other. It elucidates how art practice can engage in these processes, for example as the properties of the banyan roots collapse with Anushya’s multiple sense of being in her making of figures and installations, and as Sabes renegotiates his memories and how to convey them to the next generation by handling and photographing the pannadai. Knowing, belonging, memories and materiality intersect in the explorative process of thinking through making. The artists also want their works to effect audiences. Aruntha attempts to make the younger Tamil generations rethink their history, and Reginald works towards the inclusion of contemporary artist as a suitable occupation among diaspora Tamils. At the same time, they struggle with EuroAmerican pre-­conceptions of Sri Lankan and Tamil diaspora art. The artists’ acceptance of my intervention in their self-­research and artistic practices developed into a collaborative mode of sharing intentions and methods. The workshop was a central part that brought the six artists together for the first time. Relationships to being Tamil and a contemporary artist in the UK was addressed through materials, working methods, subject matter, emotions and politics. It initiated a platform from which they and we could explore differences and similarities, and possibilities of future synergies. Their

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interest in correspondences and lack of institutional support has motivated the inclusiveness of this chapter, even though differences among the artists also pull the reader in various directions. The decision to use the video as one part of the research presentation was a continuation of my quest to bring the audience closer to a multisensorial experience of how the investigation developed and how knowledge emerged in the process. It is an expansion of the ideas articulated already in Chapter  2 when photographic essays were incorporated into the written account of my fieldwork in India. The video piece focuses on how feelings are articulated through interactions with people and materials, and how bodily gestures and tones of voice can reinforce or hamper emotional intensities. In this particular case, it is a further attempt to transmit the centrality of making which might be less clear to viewers of art who never have engaged in artistic processes themselves. While written accounts contextualize social and cultural forces and their historical developments, the collaborative video invites the audience to share the artists’ experiences of accommodating and unaccommodating themselves through their work. Recognizing this invitation, we can immerse ourselves in diasporic ambiguous states of belonging and increase our understanding through the experiential knowledge that emerges in the process of viewing and listening. The video, like the artists’ completed works, holds the potential to transport us into an empathic affective state of disrupting and renegotiating what we know, and hereby make us familiar with how art can generate new knowledge. The different contexts where the video was presented and their respective responses will be addressed in the next chapter which concludes this investigation across artistic and anthropological fields.

9 New platforms and future possibilities

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he knowledge of how Tamils in South India and in the British diaspora with a background in Sri Lanka understand and renegotiate their everyday lives presented in this book has improved by engagements with artistic practices of making. Firstly, artistic practices have been the subject of study as forms of creating social and material relationships, through women’s daily kolam drawing and through diasporic contemporary art making. Secondly, artistic practices have been employed as methods of inquiry during fieldwork by implementing various photographic and video techniques, and additional experiments with kolam-making in collaborative and participatory workshops. These arts-­based approaches have partly conditioned the theoretical frameworks through intertwined processes of writing and imaging up. Thirdly, the research presentations have used artworks in combination with academic texts to convey new knowledge. This way of working has implications for the current debate at the intersection of art and anthropology and the hesitation towards incorporating artistic practices as valid forms of knowledge making into the hitherto dominant textual forms, as well as for claims that art practice should be free from negotiations with political institutions and local collectives. By questioning iconophobia within anthropology as well as the anxiety of academization in artistic research, this book aligns with the current advocates of the potential of future collaborations between the fields. Each discipline often assesses the other from an outsider’s perspective, but the present account employs a fluid position of active engagement in art and anthropology as well as in the development of artistic research. The practices and curricula we engage in shape our attention and understanding of the world. Artists are trained to focus on the tentative, and anthropologists on the conclusive. However, the working processes within both fields include creativity, planning, organization, analysis, improvization, contingency, and criticality, to various degrees. To build trust and make collaborations dynamic and generative, I suggest an open approach to what

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the other person can bring to a project rather than dividing roles by way of reiterating preconceived ideas of a reified expertise. Anthropologists who conduct fieldwork in unfamiliar environments know the necessity of openness and respect, as well as the enjoyment of being laughed at for not getting the point. Depending on the specific situation and people involved, differences can be related to diverse ontologies and ways of being which requires more time and effort to make communication and translation possible. I argue that the sensitivity and attentiveness required in such situations is similar to those needed in artistic practices engaged in materials and beings, and appropriate to apply in collaborative projects across academic disciplines as well as other cultural practices. Importantly, this sensitivity includes a critical approach to how unequal relationships are constituted and reproduced. Projects can become collaborative when the participants share the fundamental concern of wanting to find something out, to make an investigation, and when a certain something, a research question, is at stake for all the participants. Grant Kester investigates how art can facilitate political and social transformations, and, with reference to the art critic Jean Fisher, suggests that collaborative art’s capacity to join and alter a community and their consciousness through the experience of making the artwork can be transmitted to a re-­ presentation of the collective process in a gallery and subsequently to its audience (Kester 2011: 68). Although this understanding is based on the notion of a bounded community, it points at the generative and transformational potentials of art which are necessary to engage in the field of artistic research. As mentioned above, Henk Borgdorff argues that the epistemic efficacy of artworks is located in their vagueness and embodiment of tentative facts that offer possibilities for further questions and understandings (2012). At the same time, the conclusive analysis of an ethnographic account is always possible to deconstruct and revise after further investigations of the field. The difference between the forms can be situated in both time and space, as artworks have immediate effects on their audience in public accessible spaces and anthropological texts require prolonged concentration and reading in solitude. In this sense, the potential of collaboration between art and anthropology not only concerns various ways of making and presenting investigations but different kinds of relationships with their respective audiences where in turn strategies of working in attunement or discord with can be negotiated. Arnd Schneider and Chris Wright suggest that anthropologists should apply more of its knowledge gained by in-­depth studies of different ways of being onto its own practices. In spite of increased understanding of the plurality of roles images and art have in other cultures, suspicion towards their aesthetic effects in research representations remain (Schneider and Wright 2006: 6), and insights into cultural variations of how the senses form and are formed by human life rarely influence anthropological ways of working (ibid 2010: 6).

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Similarly, Tim Ingold argues that anthropology should implement its research findings on how individuals are constituted through continuous processes of learning in interaction with specific social and material environments by incorporating situations of making into its own teaching and learning practices (2013: 9). This final chapter summarizes how participation and collaboration have been used in the projects described, in relation to the involvement of research subjects and various audiences in expanding platforms across academic and artistic settings as well as to their capacity to generate knowledge. This is followed by kolam related work where I have developed the participatory approach into pedagogical processes of teaching and learning with students in anthropology as well as art practice, a way of working that links the transformative capacity of collaborative art discussed by Kester to Ingold’s emphasis on making in advancing our knowledge on human life. The presented attempts point beyond the function of images and objects as evidential documents and illustrations as well as beyond the inclusion of a higher level of visual abstraction and the installation of objects in exhibitions. More radically, I suggest that research presentations, of anthropological as well as artistic kinds, can engage more deeply in unfinished open forms where their completion requires physical, as well as sensory and cognitive, participation by the audience. Combined with thorough contextualization of the conventional representational kind, this form of presentation constitutes future possibilities of larger understanding and insight than the current focus on what Ingold refers to as a handing down of pre-­arranged information (2013: 13).1 Collaborative and participatory art focuses on transforming situations and relationships, and like participant observation, it uses direct involvement with beings and things to accomplish its aim. Following Ingold, knowledge does not develop by a collecting of data subsequently interpreted through theoretical frameworks, it emerges ‘in the course of direct, practical and sensuous engagements with our surroundings’ (ibid: 5). In Kester’s analysis, generative collaboration can be achieved when the artist’s learning process of the conditions aimed to engage with is slow and attuned to people’s everyday lives (2011). I propose that if the artworks are organized in close collaboration with research subjects, they can also improve the awareness of how power structures condition its realization without losing attention towards either ethics or aesthetics.

Conditions for collaboration and participation The comprehensive volume Practicable: From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art edited by Samuel Bianchini and Erik Verhagen accounts for

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the historical development and current state of participatory practices as an art form that is constituted through actual engagements by their audience (2016). In addition to an aesthetic experience of looking, thinking and feeling, it requires physical action from participants. The editors outline how socially engaged participatory practices emerged during the late 1950s as a strategy to undermine the modernist idea of the artwork as autonomous, partly building on the criticism of the separation between subject and object in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (ibid: 4). The term participatory encompasses collaborative; practicable refers to ‘works that can be actualized by practice’ as well as ‘potential site of action’; and the term interaction, or interactivity when the work includes information technology, is used to emphasize reciprocal exchange (ibid:14). Bianchini and Verhagen conceptualize participatory practices as a mode of art that is conditional (ibid: 8, 11). In opposition to constative art presented in completed form to viewers, the intersubjective actions in participatory art require that particular conditions have been organized by the artist, such as a public site to stage the work and various human and material elements that can set the work in motion and evoke the desired transformations in them. The editors use the French term dispositif to define the conditional elements in participatory practices, in its simplest translation a device (ibid: 3). Roger Sansi links the activity of participatory practices and their devices to Alfred Gell’s theory on art and artworks’ capacity to act as traps (Sansi 2015: Ch 3). Gell’s seminal analysis focuses on the agency of artworks and objects, and has hereby challenged the notion of images and objects as representations of that which is absent. Gell argues that objects are entangled with persons and receive their agency from them, and as acting agents and indexes of persons, objects become mediators in social relationships (1998). Conceptualized as traps that makes things happen, Sansi argues that the analyses of objects and their effects proposed by Gell is similar to the aim of instigating action ascribed to the conditional elements in participatory artworks, and also to the direct effect of ready-­mades such as Duchamp’s urinal (2015: 53). From Bruno Latour’s more decidedly non-­representational perspective of fluid boundaries between subject and object, further approached among artistic researchers in relation to new materialisms, the conditional elements would be acting and causing effects in themselves (2005; Sansi 2015: 57). The conditional elements (the dispositifs, devices, or traps) the artist choses to use shape the participatory, or practicable, artwork into various degrees of openness and possibilities for involvement in relation to the audience (Bianchini and Verhagen 2016: 8). This model connects with the aforementioned suggestions of how relational art that engage groups and communities with marginalized positions can advance their aims by paying larger attention to power structures and ethics; Schneider and Wright’s call for

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an evaluation by way of a differentiation between collaborative and participatory where the former concept defines a higher level collective labour (2013: 11); Sansi’s proposal to engage with anthropological theories of the gift and their elucidation of hierarchical reproduction in practices of exchange (2015: Ch 5); and Kester’s notion of increased development of long-­term engagements where artists create works that are improvisationally responsive to local conditions (2011: 125). If collaborative should be invested with a stronger sense of ethical awareness, I suggest that when the artist/researcher intends to include elements (site, people, materials) of a particular group, whether directly or indirectly addressed by the artwork, representatives of this group should be involved in the decision-­making process of setting up the conditions. In some cases, this proposition necessarily evokes the complex issue of cultural appropriation as discussed in Chapter 5 in relation to my use of kolam designs in my own work. When a relational artwork is enacted, representatives of the addressed group as well as other members of the audience become collaborators or participants depending on the degree of involvement they employ, in turn based on how the conditions of the work was set up beforehand. If invited participants transform the initial conditions according to their own agenda, their roles could change from being participatory to collaborative, and perhaps affect the understanding of the artwork in its entirety. Evaluations are yet complex, as groups have fluid boundaries and the level of engagement in a durational art event may shift along a continuum rather than between two differentiated states of being. In the following, the projects engaged with Tamil sites, people and materials will be summarized in relation to how their conditions were set up and came to affect degrees of collaboration and participation as well as to how they impacted on my epistemological concerns. The account of collaborative and participatory practices related to artistic aims in this book begins with the use of photography during ethnographic fieldwork among kolam makers in Tamil Nadu. Making portraits and group photographs was based in a collaborative way of working where research subjects to various degrees made decisions of settings, props and postures using bodily as well as verbal expressions. The main aim was to create relationships and come to know the everyday lives of the participants, not to engage them as an audience that would complete a participatory artwork. The making was part of the method of participant observation, with an emphasis on my participation in what was at hand. Based on the photographic and artistic practices I had engaged with thus far, I imagined a presentation of the visual outcomes as constative pieces. In their first form, the photographs chosen during the imaging up period figured as photographic essays that accompanied my following written thesis. They were arranged with the intention to evoke a sense of experience that would transform and expand the

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knowledge of the viewer, but without the need of their physical interaction. As shown in the photo-­poetic essay and its following contextualization in the present book, the photographs were subsequently linked to citations and incorporated into my individually curated exhibition on kolam with a similar aim as the earlier non-­textual essays. The kolam-making I participated in advanced relationships in the field, and it became a decisive method for understanding what the practice was about and further directed my theoretical framework towards the inclusion of bodily, social and cosmological rhythms. The chapter on the exhibition Performative Formations in New Delhi outlines how the kolam-making by powder and pencil evolved into stitching, and how this shift of material was co-­produced with memories of gendered aspects of my own upbringing. This part of the making process advanced my understanding of gender construction, and was not intended to have an audience. My completed kolams however, stitched in textile and glued in plastic, along with a video work that presented an abstraction of kolam rhythms, came to constitute a third of Performative Formations. Like the fieldwork photographs, my artworks were presented as constatives in the sense of not requiring the audience to act in order to be complete. But we had a performative ambition with the exhibition as we aimed to transform the gallery into a third space where the visitors could engage multisensorially and cognitively with artworks that in themselves transgressed different cultural and artistic forms, such as Nordic and Indian, and art and craft. During the opening, the fluxus-­based performance had an additional role in activating the audience. The red circled ready-­made objects with associating words functioned as a conditional element as it asked the audience to continue the process of finding new related words. We further attempted to include the gallery setting as a condition by attaching red shiny circles onto one of the walls built with rectangular concrete blocks. Placed at the centre of each block, the circles could be perceived as knobs attached to a chest of drawers and its private setting of a bedroom or hallway. The two artists and myself that constituted the we in this project aimed for reciprocity and collaboration that allowed equal input from our respective fields of expertise (kolam-making, contemporary art and academic research) as well as our varied interests to overstep them. However, due to lack of attention to cultural and historical difference during our interactions, we did not succeed in creating the third space between ourselves that we had presented to the audience. My individual continuation of the New Delhi exhibition was drained of its explicitly participatory works but potentially expanded in its performative capacity by the portrait piece Auspiciousness, new textile pieces, and a contextualizing part which I regarded as suitable for the new settings of the museum, the cultural centre and the research oriented art gallery, and for my

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aim of publicly transcending the boundary between the roles of the artist and the anthropologist. The abstract works challenged those visitors who expected informative knowledge about the Other, and the educational parts provided in-­depth analyses as a complementary form for those who wished for simple accessibility. During the first presentation of Kolam – ephemeral patterns for eternal prosperity, the pedagogical department at the Museum of Ethnography organized workshops in kolam-making for children. I suggested that instead of following the conventional arrangement of not explicitly addressing adults, a more experimental approach where any visitor could become a participant in experiential learning would have had a larger transformational effect. The workshops conducted in Chennai made use of what might be described as conditional elements. Based on long-­term engagement with Tamil everyday lives and in collaboration with my local assistant Kuladevy Elangovan, I organized settings, participants, themes and objects intended as devices that would set the workshops in motion in a manner that opened up for improvizational contributions by the participants. Their renegotiations of certain conditions could define their roles into being collaborators. These arrangements produced the conditions for an experimental practice-­based version of participant observation rather than a participatory artwork. There is a clear difference in that the workshops took place in private spaces without invitations to the surrounding public. At the same time, the workshops centred on artistic practices of making that shared the aim of socially engaged art projects in their focus on the connection between art and everyday life. They did not aim to improve the participants’ situations common to this art form, but to transform and expand my understanding about the research subjects’ worlds and ways of being. Knowledge emerged through the women’s work with cameras, themes, images and cherished objects, and as well as enhancing my understanding the workshops also affected the participants’ self-­knowledge. The kolam event realized with Tamil migrants and refugees in suburban London was markedly directed towards collaborative and participatory art in its ambition to involve research subjects and invite a large audience in its enactment and in the aim to challenge the lack of Tamil visibility in public space. The conditional elements had been collaboratively negotiated by the Tamil Community Centre, the artist Hari Rajaledchumy and myself, and consisted of an initial workshop at the centre with Rita Gnaniah as coach, the shopping area as a final stage, the visitors at the centre as participants along with the invited public, and various materials used for kolam-making. For an artist engaged in a short-­term project, the two-­day event could have been considered as a completed piece in its accomplishment of a momentary change, but for me it was an initial part of long-­term fieldwork intended to further my knowledge through continually evolving relationships with the participants. As discussed in Chapter 7, the majority of the participants could

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be apprehended as collaborators due to their cognitive as well as physical efforts in transforming the site. The event followed kolam aesthetics of beautifying and creating an auspicious mode in the environment, and in this sense challenged British notions of what public squares and streets abundant with locales for consumption are supposed to look and feel like. The participants belonged to Tamil and other diasporas that had migrated or fled from areas outside the EU, and they embraced the joyous atmosphere and the possibility to jointly expand their visibility. This development prompts the questions of whose aesthetics ought to be the guidelines for judging participatory art forms. Artists and art critics of the global contemporary art scene have mainly been trained to pay attention to practitioners with a particular form of training and sensibilities towards current trends, not to an event enacted within an ‘ethic ghetto’ without the intervention of an artist established on this scene. Neither the participating Tamil artist nor myself could be incorporated in the latter category, and I suggest that it is this absence of expertise defined by the hierarchy of knowledge in a particular discipline, rather than the potential aesthetic experience, that determines whether our event can be included in the art category. The subsequent academic presentation of the public kolam event was organized by Hari and myself, with a focus on continuing both our collaboration and the participatory aspects of the public suburban setting. With the academic symposium as a stage, we presented a shared paper accompanied by documentary photographs. As Hari finished the talk, I distributed paper, powder and glue to the audience as additional devices intended to incite their direct engagement. Through our design examples coupled with their own imagination, the audience made new kolams which in turn completed mine and Hari’s presentation. Their understanding of kolam had been enhanced through processes of thinking as well as making, and where they could engage with the material in multisensorial and open ways. While our artistic identities and aims during the event at the suburban shopping centre could be uncertain from the perspective of contemporary art, the interdisciplinary academic stage perceived our intervention, and my additional screening of the video piece of abstract kolam rhythms, as art. At the same time, the anthropological hierarchy of knowledge could define our methods and presentations as unsuitable for its discipline. The last ethnographic chapter refers to collaborative video making as an experimental research method and the following section will account for how the presenting contexts of the final edited piece Making Home – with five artists in the UK were chosen and realized. The video making with the Tamil artists was accomplished through a high level of co-­labour. I never followed the everyday lives of the protagonists with the video camera, instead our

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interaction and recording were founded in dialogues of how and where was suitable to construct appropriate settings and images. Depending on each artist, our relationships and ways of video making developed in different directions. Time was an additional factor, which enabled Hari and Ezhilojan Jeyakumar to participate in the editing to a larger degree than the other four and consequently made them more involved in the employment of sound. The aim of the completed video was to convey how the artists used their own art making to explore and come to terms with their complex identities and lives, with an emphasis on the centrality that certain materials had proved to have in their practices. These aspects were realized into form by an attention to processes of sensorial inquiry, making and reflecting rather than completed works. The artists’ multi-­layered movements between embodied memories, uncertain belongings and future prospects took shape as a split screen where images and sounds alternated between juxtapositions and various degrees of entanglements. Having become more decidedly positioned at the intersection of art and anthropology and simultaneously investigating artistic research, I intended to present the video in art spaces that could accommodate disciplinary trans­ gressions. The first setting was the gallery Tegen 2 in Stockholm, approached for its engagement in migration and similarly pressing contemporary political issues. The space integrated aesthetics and ethics, and was therefore a suitable stage to present art as an inquiry into increased knowledge about human relations and global power structures. For the gallery owners, Making Home and my exhibition proposal Homing and Migrating satisfied their political as well as artistic aims. The framing title and the written contextualization in the gallery link the Tamil artists’ continuous home making art and its presentation in the video piece to the notion of uprootings/regroundings, conceptualized by Sara Ahmed et al (2003). As discussed in Chapter 8, the authors argue that migration and change should be understood as processes that not only take place when a person shifts between geographical locations but as being intertwined with daily engagements in home making. The chosen framework called for the inclusion of kolam as an example of how home is ceaselessly made through artistic practice and how the making changes both while remaining in one place and when moving to another. Thus, the video accompanied by written excerpts of the poems it includes was installed in the main room, and the small inner space presented various kolams in the form of photographs, a video and a textile. The exhibition was curated into a presentation of completed objects without any devices for practical participation, and thus intended to affect the audience through conventional processes of seeing, sensing and reflecting. Addressing the potentials of artistic research, the introductory text was further expanded with an in-­depth article but the gallery audience was mainly directed towards experiencing artworks and few engaged with this text. The performative

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aspects of the exhibition were enlarged during the opening by way of poetry reading, and this event brought forth unforeseen limits to the planned collaboration. I had invited the Tamil artists to participate in the opening performance and contribute to the reading, and Sabes Sugunasabesan, Hari and Ezhilojan decided to make the journey from London. However, Hari and Ezhilojan who lack permanent residency in the UK were denied visas. Appealing to the Swedish Migration Agency did not help, the two ‘weekend visitors-­to-be’ were by default considered as risks and violators of migration regulations. In response to this denial of European citizenry, Hari and I created a photo-­poetic piece for the exhibition which criticized the severe restrictions on asylum seekers and refugees. Fortunately, Sabes’ British passport allowed entry and his recitation of the poem he had written for the video made a strong impact on the audience. The video Making Home has been submitted to a few ethnographic film festivals, but always considered ineligible in favour of the conventional focus on linear and textually organized narratives. Instead, the experimental platform Ethnographic Terminalia became the approving link between artistic and anthropological ways of working. Ethnographic Terminalia is a curatorial collective which has developed an exhibition format intersected with the annual conference of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). The founding members lacked a space at the reoccurring conferences that could host the artistic-­anthropological presentations an increasing number of AAA delegates wants to engage with, and they decided to arrange a new setting in the vicinity of the conference and in close collaboration with the local art scene. The locality varies every year as the conference shifts places, which consequently allows for the emergence of different creative dynamics at each Ethnographic Terminalia exhibition. The curating focuses on interdisciplinary works that bring anthropologists and artists into collaboration and has produced group exhibitions since 2009. The majority of the shown pieces, including Making Home, have been presented as completed artworks. One exception during the year of my participation (2014) was Stephanie Brodie and Amy Hiller’s The Ward: DuBois and Oral Histories. The piece consisted of a board game placed on a table encircled by inviting chairs and a contex­ tualizing film projected on the adjacent wall. It could be assessed on distance as an installation of objects, but bodily interaction through play gave enhanced access to the knowledge it aimed to convey. It held ethnographically collected memories which narrated contemporary issues and archival layers of a black community organization based on historical civil rights activism en­visioned by W. E. B. DuBois in Philadelphia. The artwork and its transforma­tional potential, conditioned by the stage, the installed objects and the detailed pre-­designed rules of the game, did not depend on but grew with audience participation.

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Collaborative and participatory art forms that depend on physical interaction by the audience in their aim to acquire social and political transformations are as mentioned above linked to Ingold’s emphasis on making as a way of learning from within and where conceptions of what we know, how we perceive, relate to and shape our environments can be altered. This can be further connected to the works of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger who propose that ‘learning is not one practice among others, but an inseparable part of all social practice’ (1991: 34).

Teaching and learning Learning takes place where participants are situated in a context and actively engaged in communities of practice, where reflection and interaction, cerebral and embodied learning, interact in the process (Lave and Wenger 1991). Ingold argues that the theoretical insights of learning should be put in practice in academic teaching, which he has realized in a course that incorporated practices of art, archaeology and architecture into anthropology (2013: 8–13). The students were introduced to conceptualizations of making, materials, perception and skill, followed by practical engagements in drawing, crafting, excavating, building and participant observation from which transformational experiences and discussions grew forth. Knowledge about human life thus evolved through complementary processes of accessing the already existent and making one’s own journey through practical forms of learning, focused on ‘a correspondence between mindful attention and lively materials conducted by skilled hands’ (ibid: 11). Ingold contends that academic courses which include situated practice where students develop relationships with materials, landscapes and senses by doing things with them evoke a higher degree of insight in comparison with those that only hand down already completed knowledge through theoretically based seminars and lectures (ibid: 13). Although this particular course had been designed as interdisciplinary, the boundaries between the four subjects had dissolved in the process of making things, knowledge and relationships with the world. Founded in my personal experiences of learning through artistic practices, as well as in the ideas presented above, kolam-making has become part of my teaching. The opportunity to develop this integration of art and anthropology has been given within both academic and artistic settings. A lecture that contextualized kolam in its gendered Hindu environment was combined with practical engagements in drawing, during a course on anthropology and art at Goldsmiths, University of London, and within an anthropological master programme on materials and design at University College London. The former occasion took place in a seminar room where kolams were made by pencil

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FIGURE 9.1

and powder at tables, and in the second we used an outdoor space where the designs could be drawn on the ground where experimentations with the right posture could be included. In both cases, the students’ attention to materials and skills were sharpened and their reflections on kolam emerged from within the practice. During two occasions realized at art schools, the Open School East (OSE) in Hackney, London, and the University College of Arts, Craft and Design in Stockholm, the kolam intervention expanded into full day events. Hari was presently enrolled at OSE and he initiated the event. However, he was slightly worried that his co-­students, focused on philosophical approaches to materials and making through new materialism and object oriented ontology, would question the relevance of drawing kolam. But the practice was well suited for OSE’s interest in city living and participatory community building with its own neighbourhood, and several students joined the event. We arranged the drawing session at an open public space by the adjacent canal to emphasize how kolam is co-­constitutive of its social environment. The open approach of the school encourages the students to invite community members to their actions, and people from both settings took part in learning about kolam during the day’s three parts of introductory lecture, public drawing and concluding discussion. The event in Stockholm was arranged within the school and only for its students, and their focus on crafting materials into art generated intense

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kolam-making and the designs covered the floor of a large exhibition area. Students have to produce a written thesis as part of their learning process and examination, and my subsequent engagement in supervising them brought forth tensions between what was perceived as open practice and closing theory. These tensions can be related to Ingold’s separation between learning in movement from within and learning through a study of the completed, but also to Kester’s account of the discrepancy between theory and practice in art curricula which have institutionalized poststructuralism and its lack of engagement in processes of making as their dominant framework for textual critique (2011: 12 –13). One of the students described the relationship between her writing and stitching practices as a differentiation of gestures. Her thoughts kept exploring and reflecting while her hands alternated between making texts in a notebook and embroidering patterns on a cloth. She learned the craft of writing and stitching as intertwined, and shifted from her experiential inquiries into theoretical frameworks more easily than the students who did not incorporate writing in their craft. Another student articulated the not uncommon anxiety that verbal descriptions and analysis would rob their material works of their power. Her notion of the forces at play relates to the performative effect ascribed to the utterance of the word wolf as a bringing forth of this potentially dangerous being or the choice of naming children after deities in the Tamil context and hereby increasing auspiciousness by calling them. The power of words is beyond the scope of this book,2 but the comments imply that conceptions of the supernatural, such as spells and non-­human agencies, could be a productive theme to explore at the intersection of art and anthropology.3 Some of the students embraced anthropological models of critical engagements with making, multisensoriality and materiality to develop the verbal analyses of their artistic work, which points at further productive connections between the fields. Engagements in practical learning as part of research presentations have recently been established within the biennial conferences arranged by the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). Launched as the format Laboratory in 2014, this new trajectory addresses anthropology’s expanding interest in works that aim beyond the text-­based and wish to involve the audience in experimental practical inquiries with uncertain outcomes. I arranged a session of collaborative kolam-making at the Anthropologies of Art Lab, which brought the delegates outdoors and encouraged them to expand their skills and learn from within by doing. The purpose of the Lab, which also included a mapping of relevant concepts, was to form an anthropology of art interest group which subsequently has developed into the new platform Anthropology and the Arts Network (ANTART), where we intend to enrich anthropological approaches to the arts and extend the interaction with local artistic spaces during coming conferences.

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Transformative potentials Sabes has described his transcultural everyday life through the Indian proverb ‘Should you be putting each foot in two different boats?’4. This is where he felt he was situated. Hari has pointed at the precariousness of this situation, the large and stifling risk of falling into the sea and drowning while trying to decide if one of the two boats could ensure a safe journey. Sabes agreed that falling in the sea is a risk on an individual level, that migration can cause intensive tension and personal trauma. ‘But’, he continued, ‘migration is part of human life, and culture is how it is lived. The cultures we leave behind and the country we are in also change. The second and third generations that come after the one who has lived with each foot in one boat, they create new cultures. People are resilient, they adapt, manage and change.’ Both research collaborators argued that there are different degrees of uncertain complexities and creative potentials, varying over time, even by the day, and in relation to movements between various contexts. Transdisciplinarity does not constitute trauma or situations of severe risk, but it shares some of the vulnerability and shifting sense of belonging visualized in Sabes’ boat figure. The capacity to balance elucidates a possibility of being multiple, and embedded potentials of experimenting in relation to unpredictable movements and readjust displaced skills according to unknown practices. The second and third generations capacity to ‘create new cultures’ is analogue to the conceptualization of transdisciplinarity as a framework for developing new forms of research by merging previously constructed disciplines, and Patricia Leavy promotes this approach as particularly suitable to investigate the already established concept hybridity (2011: 46). Sabes notion of diasporic life could be categorized through ‘the mode of cultural production’ suggested by Steven Vertovec as one of three main conceptions within diaspora studies and defined as ‘the worldwide flow of cultural objects, images, and meanings, resulting in variegated processes of creolization, back-­and-forth transferences, mutual influences, new contestations, negotiations and constant transformation’ (1997: 289). As described in Chapter  8, Hari’s critical resistance refers to a more complex and precarious sense of belonging. It is less suitable for Vertovec’s conception of the mode of cultural production, as well as of his ‘social form’ and ‘type of consciousness’ which require a notion of certainty in relation to the culture of one’s forebears. The concept of social form partly builds on practices of ‘consciously maintaining collective identity’ (ibid: 278) and although Hari shares a particular consciousness of negative ‘experiences of discrimination and exclusion’ he does side fully with the positive ‘identification with a historical heritage’ (ibid: 281). His position better coincides with Vertovec’s later examination of migrant transnationalism5 where it is recognized that not all migrants sustain or develop relationships across national borders,

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or adhere to them in limited forms (2009: 13). Completely aware of his intertwinement with more than one culture, Hari’s experiences of disciplining practices by Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka as well as British governmental bodies as specific bounded frameworks evoked confining notions of community and homeland. These demands on singular belonging are related to Foucault’s analysis of how modern institutions transform human abilities into efficiency and obedience (1977). Educational, military, medical, and industrial institutions, developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and at the time directed towards the mind rather than the physical body, are mechanics of power that discipline human life. Foucault outlines how disciplinary techniques increase our bodily forces capable of utility while simultaneously decreasing their capacity for defiance (1977: 138). Rules to accomplish what is considered as for example good handwriting or the correct way of manoeuvring a gun are prescribed in meticulous detail, to ensure the institutional aim of training productive and subjected beings by way of manipulating things rather than creating relationships with them.6 Sabes and Hari are engaged in making relationships with their boats, in line with the ideas of Elizabeth Hallam and Ingold which articulate how daily improvizations with materials and things continuously reshape predesigned social and cultural scripts (2007). Through creative forward movements, where the imagined is rendered tangible by the making of images and objects, they counteract the arresting subtle regulations described by Foucault as the neutralization of any resistance to power (1977: 219). The differences in their notions of being and belonging are partly related to that Sabes arrived as a migrant before the LTTE militarized their political agenda and subsequently became categorized as terrorists by the EU, while Hari entered as an asylum seeker when these developments had taken place. Perhaps even more significant, Hari claims a fluid queer identity. The potential capacity of future generations to ‘create new cultures’ is invalid in this case and merely a manifestation of heteronormative regulations of reproduction.7 Hari argues that the creative hybrid is a stagnated idea that should be related to the notion of depression to better comprehend how migrants with inherited traumas adapt, a concept further highlighted by Ann Cvetkovich as a felt experience effected by neoliberal capitalism and a necessary category in order to productively theorize contemporary culture and everyday life (2012, see also Kristeva 1989). The precarious position across two boats henceforth has at least two sides; it means death by drowning which makes it extraneous for future possibilities and a claim for the now, and it refers to a conviction of transformational dynamics which enables hope and imaginations of better opportunities. For Sabes and Hari, the explorations of belonging and home making at this conjunction continues through their varied forms of artistic practices.

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Returning to the academic field through Foucault, modern institutions produce knowledge according to certain hierarchies of supervising and rewarding (1977), and it seems plausible that effective subjects apt to reproduce the correct knowledge could be considered useful for any establishment or academic discipline. But as mentioned earlier, a research environment needs to challenge its presumptions in order to expand and thrive. The academic organisation of bounded disciplines is currently growing into various constellations of inter- and trans-­disciplinary forms with exchanges of methods and theoretical approaches, hence also the current realignment between art and anthropology. Through the conceptualization of humans as biosocial becomings, Ingold and Gísli Palsson (2013) argue for an expansion of this approach, where scholars move beyond the division between the natural and social sciences, and within anthropology beyond the critique of the nature-­culture dichotomy. In relation to the current developments of climate change and its impact on geopolitics as well as everyday lives, and genetic engineering where humans transform organisms, Palsson suggests that it is time to integrate biological and social anthropology in order to enhance our understanding of ‘the phenomenon of life’ (rather than human life) (2013: 238). From a historical perspective, disciplinary boundaries have never been fixed, and it is further argued that the current boundaries of anthropology seem stagnated and restrictive and might have inhibiting effects on the discipline (ibid: 231). Ingold and Palsson seem to point in a similar direction as transdisciplinarity in the sense of placing the research issue before existing academic boundaries. Certain discourses within transdisciplinarity uses effec­ tiveness as an argument for working across disciplines (Klein et al 2001; Leavy 2011), but the current proposal is concerned with deepened understanding through access to an expanded number and alternative set of tools, and through an awareness of the risk of compromising specificities and differences. It is not a suggestion of abandoning particular disciplines, but an encouragement towards stepping outside of one’s comfort zone to bring the particular inquiry and its subsequent presentation forward. As highlighted in the introduction of this book, artistic research pays limited attention to the division between social and natural sciences. For an anthropologist, it is an enigma to be considered grounded in the same strict forms of measurement as a chemist in a laboratory and claiming an objective stance towards the world. But rethinking the artist’s position in relation to the proposition of humans as biosocial becomings, perhaps the singular approach towards academic frameworks among artists and artistic researchers at the same time holds a larger openness to collaboration across the conventional natural-­cultural divide than Ingold and Palssson argue that anthropologists do. In the case of BioArt, artists are concerned with human life in relation to biotechnology and the life sciences and make use of genetic engineering and live materials such as tissues and proteins. Unlike anthropologists, artists

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often manipulate their own body as a tool for inquiry, for example Neil Harbisson who implanted an antenna in his skull that transformed his colour blindness into audible colour experiences (2012), and Stelarc8 who has performed with hard prostheses such as a third arm and now surgically sculpts a soft prosthese in the form of an ear on his arm that will make people in different places hear what is transmitted through the additional implant of a microphone. Transformations of the body have both individual and social consequences, and Stelarc’s ear could be framed as participatory practice, where the artist’s manipulated body acts as a conditional element that requires an audience’s hearing to be realized. Collaborations between anthropologists and these cyborgian activities and lives would intensify the debates of how to evaluate aesthetics in relation to ethics, and they would pose further questions regarding when boundaries are necessary certainties or confining regulations. Art is constituted through social and cultural practices, and is as such a suitable subject of anthropological research. Its potential to inquire about and transform what we know is part of what has constituted artistic research as a separate academic field. Artists who are able to evoke new thoughts and questions through unexpected combinations of beings and things through conditional works as well as more conventional constatives are credible complements to anthropological efforts to expand our knowledge of cultural differences and similarities. The interweaving of transformational capacities, within art through collaborative and participatory practices and within anthropology as embodied participant observation and a comprehensive theoretical outlook, points at productive connections between artistic and anthropological ways of working. Through a recognition of various possible combinations of strategies, I propose that art cannot be an instrument for academia or other institutions, but is an additional opportunity to do and develop research with. The projects presented in this book are examples of how a collaborative and transdisciplinary approach can strengthen the research process and its formation of suitable presentation forms, as well as advance pedagogical practices of teaching and learning. The process of writing has now brought them into a certain closure, and although some of the photographs lack captions to mitigate this effect they are largely framed by the overall structure. It is my ambition that the scholarly form can function as a vehicle for critical contemplation, but at the same time evoke new experiments and support ongoing plans unruly towards disciplinary restrictions. The examples engage with how boundaries dissolve and emerge through progressive as well as confining forms of social interaction, and in constant renegotiations across selves, communities, geographies and knowledge fields. I suggest that in order to mobilize all available capacities to enhance the understanding of our multifaceted contemporary world, we should facilitate further developments of global transdisciplinary networks engaged in artistic and anthropological collaborations.

Notes 1:  Working with art and anthropology: An introduction 1 How we come to know the world and our position within it has been a central issue in philosophy and anthropology. Aristotle was an early proponent for practical wisdom and skill in addition to intellectual modes of knowing while Descartes many centuries later argued for a distinction where the body is a mechanical device controlled by the thinking mind. Anthropological theorisations of fieldwork across the globe have been informed by these classical epistemological positions, and articulated in terms of integrations or separations between the tacit and the voiced, the gestural and the linguistic, the embodied and the cognitive, the active and the closed (Harris 2007). In the volume Ways of Knowing, Mark Harris argues that anthropological theorization should maintain the differentiation between tacit and voiced forms of knowledge, but at the same time engage with their integration. Together with Nigel Rapport, he refers to coming to know as ongoing zigzagging movements, where different modes of knowing develop as pathways in relation to various contexts. This way of knowing, where the tacit and the voiced are acknowledged as different but interdependent kinds, is ‘not just an ethnographic strategy but a reflection of the everyday tasks and needs of an individual’ (Harris and Rapport 2007: 232). They further join anthropologists who use philosophy, neuroscience, psychology and history to reach an eclectic approach which they argue is better equipped to enhance our understanding of human being and knowing. This interdisciplinary perspective presents experiences as mediated by intellectual as well as biological processes. The contributor Trevor Marchand questions the separation between cognitive and embodied knowledge with reference to neurological research and his apprenticeship in masonry in Yemen and Mali (2007, cf 2010). Neurology shows that the brain is not an abstract mentor but integrated with the body through neural systems and networks. Cognitive processes are constituted through experience which take place in relation to the social and physical environment, and theories of mirror neurons and dynamic syntax elucidate the impact of these engagements. The development of Marchand’s masonry abilities resonated with the neuroscientific results in its integrated processes of skill-­based practices, verbal dialogue and modes of reflection situated in a specific context (2007: 199). Various perspectives have produced tensions which further impact on the possibility to integrate art and anthropology. The initial period of anthropology held an interest in vision and material forms as

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mediators of knowledge, but after the consolidation of structural-­functionalism in the 1930s these domains were discarded in favour of language and compositions of the mind (Grimshaw 2001). The shift from the perceivable to interiority developed in relation to the renunciation of evolutionist practices of anthropometric photography and museum collecting and their association with colonial exploitation. Although fieldwork was established as the core of anthropology, subjective experiences in relation to a material world were not theorised as constitutive of knowledge and therefore excluded from written representations. Artistic works were associated with appearance and incapable of creating knowledge and social relations. However, this approach has been challenged from the 1960s, within the critique of literary as well as visual forms of representation (Schneider and Wright 2006). 2 Central works in the field visual anthropology are Marcus Banks (2001), Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy (1997), Elizabeth Edwards (1992, 1997, 2001, 2006a and b), Elizabeth Edwards and Chris Morton (2015), Anna Grimshaw (2001), Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz (2009), Paul Hockings (1975), David MacDougall (1998), Chris Pinney (1997, 2011), Chris Pinney and Nicholas Peterson (2003), Sarah Pink (2001), Lucien Taylor (1994, 1996) and Chris Wright (2004, 2013). However, there are several cross-­overs between the authors in this note and the following four. 3 The field anthropology of the senses has mainly been established by Constance Classen (1993, 1998), Steven Feld (1982), David Howes (1991, 2003), Nadia Seremetakis (1994), Paul Stoller (1989, 1997), Michael Taussig (1993) and put in relation to practices of visual anthropology for example by Cristina Grasseni (2009), David MacDougall (2006), Sarah Pink (2006), and Chris Pinney (2001). 4 Phenomenologically informed anthropological literature was mainly introduced by Thomas Csordas (1994) and Michael Jackson (1996), and has been further developed by Tim Ingold (2000, 2011, 2013) who also figures prominently in the current book. 5 The longer historical developments of various alignments between art and anthropology have been elaborated at length and will not be repeated in detail in this book. Instead, readers are additionally referred to James Clifford (1988), Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz (2015), George Marcus and Fred Myers (1995), Arnd Schneider (2006, 2012), Arnd Schneider and Chris Wright (2006, 2010, 2013) and Roger Sansi (2015). 6 Roger Sansi’s focus on theoretical issues and concepts is shared by Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov who has developed the strand ethnographic conceptualism partly based in conceptual art (2013). 7 The more recent volume The Social Life of Materials: Studies in Material and Society by Adam Drazin and Susanne Küchler explicitly engages with materials and processes of making (2015). They explore what happens in transformations between substance and form, but emphasize the importance of effects and properties of materials in relation to the impact of making in comprehending sociocultural implications of materials. 8 The theme subject-­object is a central dimension of the anthropology of art, essentially developed by Alfred Gell (1998) and his theory of indexical agency of images and objects, and of material culture studies, where Daniel Miller

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argues that material objects are intertwined with all social relationships (1998, 2005), and Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell suggest that things are matters that we think and conceptualise through (2006). In mainstream anthropology as well as in artistic research, Bruno Latour’s challenge of the distinction between human intentional action and material causality, divided between the social and natural sciences (2005), remains prominent. The recognition of an agency of materials and objects among these authors implies that we ethnographically study things in themselves, not as signifiers of something else. 9 Krystal D’Costa makes a comparison with the historical Great Wall of China and Hadrian’s Wall, and argues that while Donald Trump tries to make a (simplistic) statement about permanence, security and identity through the construction of the wall at the Mexican border, borders, including those with high walls, have in fact always been sites of exchange (2017). 10 The politics of belonging, which in the case of the Tamil diaspora concerns transnational mobilization and contesting views about the LTTE, the ending of the war, post-­war leadership, continued subordination of Tamils in Sri Lanka, possibilities of separatism or self-­determination, and responses from the UN to the Tamil claim for war crimes investigations, have not been accounted for in detail in the current study. Certain opinions and perspectives on these developments entail severe risks and require that individual statements are anonymized. The diaspora artists in this study gave their consent to be named individually, a necessity for their participation as they are too few to properly anonymize but also as a statement of our level of collaboration, and therefore some testimonials had to be omitted. An in-­depth analysis that connects Tamil diasporic life to political mobilization, social activism and events occurring in Sri Lanka has recently been provided by Amarnath Amarasingam, from an inside perspective (based on anonymity) of Tamils situated in Canada (2015).

2:  Visual and visceral encounters with kolam in South India 1 This introduction has been published in the doctoral thesis In Conversation with the Kolam Practice: Auspiciousness and Artistic Experiences among Women in Tamilnadu, South India (Laine 2009). Women make related images in many parts of India, on the ground as well as on walls. They vary regionally and are named differently in the particular local language. As kolam, they are also drawn among Tamils in Sri Lanka. Migration and travelling between South Asia and other parts of the world is making the kolam tradition available for ever expanding audiences and practitioners. While this chapter includes certain aspects of the tradition, a fuller account is given in the thesis. 2 Hindu vision as a form of corporeal contact with both positive and negative effects, and its importance in facilitating reciprocity between devotee and deity has been demonstrated in many ethnographic accounts of Tamil Nadu (Daniel 1984; Fuller 1992; Mines 1994; Nabokov 2000; Trawick 1996) and

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emphasized in an increasing amount of visual and material culture studies of Hindu India (Gell 1998; Jain 2007; Pinney 1997, 2001, 2004; Ramaswamy 2003). It has been further stressed in earlier descriptions which do not always use the concepts darshan and drishti (Diehl 1956; Gonda 1969; Thurston 1912, see also Laine 2013). 3 The goddess Lakshmi is often presented as the main addressee of the kolam practice and its connection with the abundance of rice and following prosperity. However, kolam makers have individual preferences and among the non-Brahmins I interacted with, Mariamman was commonly turned to in daily worship. Among Catholic converts, many women made daily kolams for the Virgin Mary. During festivals, Protestant and Muslim neighbours, along with any boys or men, sometimes help to extend the graceful images and everybody comes together in joyful creativity. 4 Early ethnographic accounts have described the caste structure through a holistic approach (Dumont 1970; Marriott 1976, 1990; Srinivas 1969), however later criticized for their lack of attention to diversity and change (Appadurai 1986; Béteille 1996; Quigley 1993) and to colonial influence and following rigid reconstructions (Dirks 2001). The subaltern studies have further demonstrated power struggles related to alternative ideologies through voices of the inferior (Fuller 1996; Ludden 2003; Pandian 2007). Recent studies show that caste is prevalent in Tamil Nadu and that the ritually defined high position of the Brahmins as the purest has transformed into material power (Fuller and Narasimhan 2008), and the violent discrimination of Dalits persists (Viswanathan 2005). 5 The term Dalit, which means broken or downtrodden, was appropriated by the lowest castes during their political movements in the mid-­twentieth century. It connotes the struggles and sufferings of people previously referred to as the untouchables, in administrational discourse categorised as Scheduled Castes, and in Tamil Nadu dominated in number by the caste Paraiyars (Gorringe 2007). Nathaniel Roberts has, in his recent ethnographic study of conversion among Dalits in a Chennai slum, argued that scholars on colonial and post-­colonial India have failed to recognize that the British depended on enslaved Dalits as much as on collaborative Brahmins, and that the continuous systematic dehumanization of Dalits in race-­like terms with exclusively negative characteristics has not yet been given proper attention (Roberts 2016: 2–3). The prevailing anthropological understanding of caste as a holistic system, mainly through structural (Dumont 1970) or transactional (Marriott 1976) frameworks where Dalits are opposed to Brahmins (see also Pandian 2007), has become subject to trenchant critique by scholars such as Gajendran Ayyathurai (2010), founder of the Critical Caste Studies Group at Georg August Universität, Göttingen. 6 The legal regulation of caste discrimination, as an aspect of race, has been debated in the British Government during the last decade (Waughray 2014). 7 This portrait forms part of the photo-­poetic essay in Chapter 4. 8 The connection between completeness and cosmos, the full moon, the fullness of offering and the sacred pot as the fundamental form of the goddess has been further developed in my doctoral thesis (Laine 2009).

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9 The translation of the Tamil term kolam reveals how outer appearance is embedded in ideas of religion and morality: form, symmetry, appearance, character, appropriate dress, beauty, gracefulness (Winslow 1983). 10 I have had similar experiences in front of completed artworks in galleries, for example during my encounter with Anselm Keifer who was a main source of motivation in my early art practice. Keifer is one of the artists Schneider and Wright refer to in their initial volume, and they elaborate on the physicality and tactility of the artist’s works with a focus on pieces where he has used books as the main subject. It is argued that the Keifer’s capacity to affect the audience multisensorially through his book-­works in metal, paper and oil creates an ambiguity concerning the status of books and the language they contain. Hereby, the work constitutes the productive tension between art object and text that the authors suggest needs to be addressed to enhance the engagements between art and anthropology (Schneider and Wright 2006: 5). My own experience of Kiefer’s works was more directly concerned with materiality and how I imagined his working process with the sternness and weight of metal in combination with soft oil and other substances. He evoked new ways of working where I experimented with adding various stuff from sand and fur to my daughter’s outgrown pyjamas into my oil paint and my makings of two dimensional landscapes. 11 The German term Bildung is etymologically constructed through Bild, which translates as ‘image’. This Bild does not refer to the idea of art and aesthetic experience as vehicles for enhanced insight, but to the idea of a particular model (Bild) of refined knowledge which each individual should strive to become, or perhaps embody. The initial ideal model was imago dei, the image of god within Christian mysticism, but this soon transformed into all hitherto accumulated knowledge accessible to mankind. Attempts to translate the full term Bildung to English has suggested self-­cultivation and even culture (Liedman 1997: Ch.7; Nordenbo 2002).

3:  Art making as third space across India and Sweden 1 In James Clifford’s case, contact zone specifically concerns relations between personnel and source communities in ethnographic museums. He builds on Mary Louise Pratt’s definition which refers to the encounter between colonizer and colonized. She argues against separation and complete subordination of the colonized and instead emphasizes contact zones as sites of interaction and exchange (Pratt 1992). 2 Partha Mitter’s Much Maligned Monsters is a classical historical account of how European responses to Indian art developed from an initial condemnation of all forms towards a less brutal approach that recognized variations (1977). 3 The art historian Hannah Higgins notes that the Fluxus members criticized the notion of the controlled disembodied gaze in traditional Western art history and explored a framework where visual perception was linked to

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experiential knowledge and the dissolution of subject-­object boundaries. She connects these aims with phenomenology and the ecological psychology of James Gibson (Higgins 2002: 12), which provides a link to the works of Tim Ingold (2000). 4 Several Fluxus actions have been scripted into Event Scores which enable reiterations and modifications in new settings (Higgins 2002). 5 A related and more recent project within the same field of art biennales that Sierra engages with is The Place of the Thing by Roger Bernat where members of various art groups and collectives were hired to carry a sculpture in a procession through Athens at Documenta 14 in May 2017. However, a participating LGBTQI refugee rights group stole the object and accused Bernat of exoticizing and exploiting their vulnerable position instead of offering them a voice of their own. Available at https://www.artforum.com/ news/id=68785 (accessed 26 August 2017).

5:  Engagements in the ethnographic museum and contemporary art galleries 1 In Swedish, the centre in Angered is called Blå stället, which refers to the blue colour of the building but also the type of blue overall used by the workers of the shipyards which were central to the establishment of welfare in modern Gothenburg. 2 Jean Rouch is considered to be a pioneering ethnographic filmmaker involved with collaboration and the imaginative, but he has also been criticized for not engaging with colonial power relations and reproducing stereotypes of childlike Africans (Henley 2009: 331–35).

6:  Artistic methods in urban South India 1 Asking for consent for using the photographs evoked an awkward atmosphere, as if I had invalidated the trust we had established during the workshops. The unexpected reaction challenged our collaboration for a short moment, which brings forth Sansi’s argument described in the introduction of the book and developed under the heading ‘Notes on names’ of how conventional anthropological ethics can reproduce a hierarchy between the professional researcher who offers and the local amateur who merely responds. 2 Institutions and businesses were also engaged in organizing kolam competitions at the annual peak of the practice during the harvest festival in mid-January, and this provided a chance for them to brand their names (Laine 2009). 3 Varying forms of expressing and negotiating with Hindu scriptures in relation to everyday morality and aesthetics among Brahmin women in South India have been elucidated by Leela Prasad (2007).

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4 During later fieldwork in Tamil Nadu, people of lower castes have reiterated experiences of Brahmin ownership of correct aesthetic capacities for particular practices, for example the impossibility of career making in Bharatanatyam dance. There have further been instances of Brahminic claims of the correct knowledge of the kolam practice. 5 Kuladevy and I discussed my interpretation of Sassi’s and Kumar’s feelings for each other in detail. At first, she argued that the kind of love expressed in their friendship and gift giving was overstated and that an Indian reader might think that the two had planned to be become secret lovers which in turn would be confrontational towards the man and marriage Sassi now is fully committed to. These objections speak of how sensitive the issue of a woman’s potential unchastity is in this context, but they also point at the possibility of the anthropologist’s misinterpretation of what actually is being conveyed. However, when I explained that I was referring to the Tamil term anbu as the translation for love, and not kadhal which connotes physical desire, the issue was solved. Hence the reason for at times including vernacular words in ethnographic accounts, as in the beginning of this chapter. Nevertheless, the names of the two close friends are changed in order to not invoke problems in theirs or any other readers’ lives. This is the conventional strategy, but following my increased focus on collaboration I strive for solutions of shared authority where research presentations also may include people’s real names. Conceptions of anbu has been elaborated in detail by Margaret Trawick in Notes on Love in a Tamil Family (1996). 6 Euro-American photographic theory was based on the notion of occularcentrism which privileges vision over other senses. It claimed that we perceive and understand the world mainly through what we see. Analyses of photography focused on content, and Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, who became the authorities in this field during the 1980s, argued that each photograph has a stable meaning hidden in grammatical codes possible to trace and define (Barthes 1981; Sontag 1977). Neither of them paid attention to the relationships at work when an image is made, nor to the fact that photographs are objects. Their framework is based in semiotics and C. S. Peirce’s sign categories symbol, icon and index. The indexicality of photographic material remains as a conceptualization of its ontological status, and Pinney has reassessed this concept in relation to magic and animism (2011). Indexical signs have a causational relationship to their referent, and in the case of photography the physical act of light bouncing off objects through the camera lens and onto filmic emulsion or digital material leaves traces that constitute the image. Pinney argues that we tend to believe that these traces are real in the sense of embodying parts of the depicted, particularly in the case of portraits. He makes an analogue with James Frazer’s definition of contagious magic as described in his late nineteenth-­century work ‘The Golden Bough’ with protocols of magic across the world (Pinney 2011: 66). Frazer defined contagious magic as a practice that needs a portion or trace of a person, like footprints, fingernails or hair, in order to affect that person. Following Pinney, a photograph of for example a lost relative affects us in a similar manner as if we had kept a hair lock of this person. Elisabeth Edwards, who has studied photography in the Pacific as well as in the museum context, represents a relational perspective.

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She has investigated physical traces of persons in photography in further depth, but instead of conceptualising images as signs, she defines them as social objects and conduits of memory (1999, 2006). The photographic object merges with the image content and these two ontological layers give us access to how we remember the past. The evocation of memory and presence in the photograph is linked to religious relics in Edwards’s analysis. The relic quality is not described as an index but understood as embodied in the physical object. Like a hair lock is a part of a saint, the photograph is a genuine part of the depicted person. The connection between photography and how we remember is also illuminated by Marianne Hirsch in her studies of how experiences of the past can be transferred through images into to a second generation, a process she defines as post-­memories (2008). While certain cultures are more explicit in their notion of an ancestral or divine presence in objects and photographs (Davis 1997; Pinney 1997, 2004; Wright 2004, 2013), many Westerners sense a comfort in carrying photographs of loved ones in their wallet or mobile and used to have pictures taken of deceased family members to not lose them completely (Hallam and Hockey 2001).

7:  ‘Making kolams in London’: A collaborative and participatory art event 1 Vellala is the second highest caste in religious terms among Tamils in Sri Lanka, but the highest according to class and landownership. Until the increase of refugees after the escalation of the armed conflict on the island in 1983, it was almost exclusively members of Brahmin and Vellala castes that had the possibility to move abroad. 2 An additional method I used during fieldwork with Tamils in London, which perhaps could be considered artistic as well, was the role of acting as the ‘other’ culture in a London-­produced Tamil TV-series which focused on problems that arise in encounters with the British environment. I participated as various protagonists that acted in unfamiliar and sometimes immoral ways, for example being the white woman married to a Tamil migrant and considered to be the cause of instability within the family due to constant arguments about how to bring up the children. The productions were not focused on simple solutions of avoidance but tried to engage in complexities and various manners of compromising and negotiating. Being within the half-­fictional half-­real character, sometimes speaking rapidly rehearsed Tamil phrases, deepened my insights into what it can mean to live a transcultural life. I was acting with people that simultaneously were research subjects in my study, and the staged scene allowed both our dialogues and physical movements to enter into and express issues that were considered impolite in our daily interactions. 3 Skin tone is a central parameter within the complex caste structure, where a light tone is related to high caste and beauty, and dark tones are associated with low caste. This categorization can in turn be linked to processes founded in Indo-European romanticism and Orientalist discourses. Based on linguistic findings in the eighteenth century, European scholars held that the ‘Aryans’,

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inhabiting north India, were closely related to the Europeans. They were assumed to have degenerated through mixing with indigenous groups who spoke Dravidian languages, unrelated to Sanskrit and the Sanskrit derived languages of the north. This mixing was argued to have taken place due to an Aryan conquest whereby the Dravidians were pushed south. During the colonial period, positivist scientists transformed these categories into races, where the Aryans were considered whiter and more ‘civilized’ (Dirks 2001). India became a site for anthropometrical studies in which photography was one of the tools utilized to classify individuals’ group belonging. The depicted outer form was understood as visual evidence of an inner moral character, but the character defined a caste or occupational type, never a particular subject (Pinney 1997). The theory of the ‘Aryan-Dravidian’ divide included identifications of the former group as Brahmins and the latter as nonBrahmins. This hierarchical categorization strongly influenced the political non-Brahmin movement during the twentieth century, and it continues to be part of how Tamil identities are constituted (Pandian 2007, cf Laine 2009: 4–5) 4 The historical development of hegemonic whiteness in Sweden has recently been mapped into three phases: ‘the white purity period (phase 1) between 1905–1968; the white solidarity period (phase 2) between 1968–2001; and the white melancholy period (phase 3) from 2001 and onwards. In the course of these three phases, Sweden has shifted from overt race biology and racial policies through official colour-­blindness and multiculturalism to the current era’s mourning of the past’ (Hübinette and Lundström 2014: 425). 5 These materials respectively refer to works of Rikrit Tiravanija’s Untitled (Still), 1992, Francis Alÿs’ When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002, and Santiago Sierra’s Workers Who Cannot Be Paid, Remunerated to Remain Inside Cardboard Boxes, 2000. 6 The Adivasi communities constitute the indigenous population in India. They face similar forms of discrimination as the Dalits and are categorized as Scheduled Tribes in the national scheme of reservations in education and government jobs. The artists within the Dialogue collective developed new water pumps and spaces for children’s learning and playing in a field of tension where Adivasi artistic and religious practices were increasingly confined by the mining industry, the tribal art market and the Hindutva movement (which claims Hinduism as the only religion in India and is incorporated into the currently ruling party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)). These projects developed over a period of eight years and were further attentive to distributions of power as well as Adivasi organizations of space and gender (Kester 2011: 77– 95).

8:  Sharing practices with British Tamil artists 1 I have expanded on the absence of institutional support for Tamil artists in the article ‘Locating Art Practice in the British Tamil Diaspora’. This includes how colonial interests and impositions of Victorian aesthetic ideals intersect with the conflicting Sinhalese and Tamil nationalisms in this process, and how both

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Sinhala and Tamil artists joined Indian anti-­colonial artists in their reclaim of local art and craft traditions during the early decades of the twentieth century (Laine 2015a: 4–7). 2 The specificity of the participating artists’ situation, and the aim of presenting the video, made it impossible to offer them anonymity. This was accepted by all on conditions of continuing a careful approach to what was included. But as the work developed into a collaborative process of co-­researching, the idea of anonymity central to traditional ethnographic fieldwork lost its relevance. 3 The group re:start is less active since Tamilini Jothilingam moved to Toronto for a master in visual arts. 4 The colonial elevation of Brahmins and Sanskrit and the subsequent denigration of the Tamil language relates back to Note 2 in Chapter 7 on Indo-European romanticism and the theory of the Aryan-Dravidian divide. Based on the same ideas of a Dravidian Tamil lower, Sinhala language and culture was held to be of Aryan Brahmin descent.

9:  New platforms and future possibilities 1 If we relate Ingold’s separation between ethnography; as documentary retrospective description of fieldwork, the study of and learning about from the outside, and anthropology; as transformational forward movement, the study with and learning from within (2013: 3), to anthropological research presentations that aim beyond academic texts, the differentiation could be suitable for conventional ethnographic films with their focus on accurate description and contextualization. However, documentary making is also part of art practice albeit in a more experimental form than ethnographic films. Applied to the intention of increased collaboration between art and anthropology, the separation seems less appropriate. It could be argued that the categorization of ethnography and documentary into one and only concerned with description disqualifies a particular form of art practice which in turn might create an unnecessarily hesitant approach among artists towards anthropologists. Depending on the kind of documentary, it may also have a transformative character that engenders the knowledge from within that Ingold seeks. As a further development of the suggestion of drawings, sculptures, musical compositions and craft as possible result of anthropological research (ibid: 8), I hold that collaborative artworks directed towards a transformation of themselves and their cognitively and physically interactive audiences have a larger potential for the effects he claims to be seeking. 2 The speech-­act theory was constituted in linguistics by John L. Austin, and central to Judith Butler’s development of performativity theory focused on the role of speech in constructions of heteronormativity. 3 Within this group, I further learned that students trained in arts and craft not necessarily perceive photography as an art form. My suggestion to include photography beyond documents in the visualizations of their artworks in the required thesis came across as incomprehensive.

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4 The proverb concerns states of indecision, available at https://ta.wikisource. org/wiki/   –1.pdf/146 in Tamil and translated by Hari Rajaledchumy (accessed 21 February 2017). 5 Vertovec describes transnationalism as a key concept in understanding migrant practices, and a fundamental turn within the anthropology of migration through its shifted focus from groups in specific places to groups and their activities across borders (2009: 13, 2010: 8). 6 Foucault defined Benthams’ prison design Panopticon as the ultimate form of regulation, which accomplished utility and obedience through its automatic and de-­individualized technique where the disciplined could be the object of surveillance at any time, hence the term ‘panopticism’ to describe the disciplining mechanics (1977: 215). The institutional subjects had to learn to always pay attention to the possibility of being watched and corrected. 7 The queer position within the South Asian diaspora has been discussed in relation to the generally marginalizing approach to people who chose art practice as their main occupation in the Tamil migrant communities in my article Locating Art Practice in the British Tamil Diaspora (Laine 2015a). 8 Stelarc’s works can be accessed at stelarc.org (accessed 21 February 2017).

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Index activism, 7, 126, 146, 178, 189n Adivasi, 134, 195n aesthetics British, 120, 123, 130, 134 conversational, 7 Kantian, 6 of the household, 102 relational, 7, 55–6, 112, 156 social, 7 see kolam aesthetic experience, 16, 38, 101, 159, 172, 191n aesthetic regime, 134–5, 137 agency, 42, 47, 132, 134 of objects and materials 116–17, 121, 135, 172, 188–9n Ahmed, Sara, 160, 177 aisthitikos, 7 Aloysius, Reginald S., 138, 148–52, 162 Alÿs, Francis, 195n Amarasingam, Amarnath, 189n anbu, 99, 193n anthropology, 2 activist, 124 applied visual, 124, 130 of the senses, 38, 188n shared, 93 visual, 188n anthropology and ethnography, 10, 196n Anthropology and the Arts Network, 5, 181 apprenticeship, 39, 187n appropriation, 90–1 Arnheim, Rudolf, 37–8 art, 7 and anthropology, 4–11 history of, 188n autonomous, 6, 8, 134, 172

collaborative, 7, 132, 134, 171–9, 196n community, 6, 124 conditional, 132, 171–9,185 constative, 172 diaspora, 159, 163 participatory, 7, 134, 156, 171–9, 185 political, 56, 135 socially engaged, 7–8, 142, 175 artistic research, 11–14, 177, 184 Arunadevi, 95, 103, 105, 109 Aryan, 28, 194–6n atman, 25 attention, education of, 9, 28, 38 auspiciousness, 26–7, 31, 53, 80, 88, 105, 181, 189n avant-garde, 6, 132 Ayyathurai, Gajendran, 190n Babb, Lawrence, 25 Banks, Marcus, 188n Barthes, Roland, 193n beings and things, 10, 171 belonging, 158–60, 164, 182–3, 189n Bernat, Roger, 192n Bhabha, Homi, 16, 42, 55 bhakti, 25, 43 Bhavani, 97, 108, 114 Bianchini, Samuel, 171–2 Bildung, 38, 191n BioArt, 184 biosocial becomings, 15, 184 Bishop, Claire, 55–7, 113, 132 Blue Place Cultural Centre, Gothenburg, 91 Boltanski, Christian, 89 borders, 14–15, 182, 189n, 196n Borgdorff, Henk, 12–13, 170

210

Index

Bourdieu, Pierre, 47 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 7, 56, 112, 132, 156 brahman, 25, 31 Brahmin, 111, 123, 162, 190n, 192n, 195n Brunei Gallery, London, 91 Bruneland, Stine, 158–9 Buck-Morss, Susan, 7 Busby, Cecilia, 47, 116 Butler, Judith, 47, 196n caste, 21, 25, 27–8, 52, 97, 105, 112–13, 116, 126, 145, 162, 190n, 192n, 194n Chandra, Mohini, 159 Chettiyar, 44 Classen, Constance, 38, 188n Clifford, James, 6, 42, 188n, 191n collages, 45 colonialism, 8, 14, 45, 88, 90, 113, 162, 190n, 194–6n completeness, 31, 53, 55, 190n contact zone, 42, 55, 191n corpothetics, 7 crafting, 39, 46, 89, 96, 103, 179, 181, 196n correspondence, 9, 39, 179 Csordas, Thomas, 188n curating, 178 Cvetkovich, Ann, 183 Dalit, 28, 151, 153, 190n, 195n Daniels, Valentine, 116 darshan, 3, 25, 27, 29, 37, 190n darisanam, 25 defamiliarization, 166 depression, 183 device, 172, 175 Dewey, John, 5 dividual, 116 documenta 14, 192n documentary, 88, 129, 166, 176, 196n Dialogue collective, 134, 195n diasporic existence, 158, 160, 167, 182 discipline, 182–4, 197n dispositif, 172 Dravidian, 28, 162, 194–6n

drawing, 23, 27, 30, 34, 38–9, 46, 50, 103, 122, 125, 129, 133, 155–6, 179, 196n Drazin, Adam, 188n drishti, 25, 27, 29, 37, 190n Duchamp, Marcel, 172 Dumont, Luis, 116, 190n Eck, Diana, 3, 25, 37 editing, 157, 166, 177 Edwards, Elizabeth, 3, 117–18, 160, 188n, 193n Elangovan, Kuladevy, 96–7, 104, 112, 115, 193n embodiment, 25, 29, 39, 47, 93, 102, 122, 159, 170, 179, 185, 194n emotion, 2, 37, 90, 98–103, 114, 118, 123, 139, 159, 162, 168 environment, 9, 15, 25, 37, 116, 121, 130–1, 138, 164, 166, 187n ethics, 6, 8, 91, 113, 125, 131, 135, 172, 185, 192n ethnographic film, 93, 196n Ethnographic Terminalia, 4, 178 ethnographic turn, 6 exchange, 11, 25, 30, 90, 116–17, 130, 157, 173 experience, 2, 24, 37–8, 90, 120, 133, 168, 172, 179, 187-9n Fabian, Johannes, 38 familiarizing, 89 fear, 119, 123, 165 Feld, Steven, 38, 188n feminine, 26, 43, 47, 109 Fisher, Michael, 2, 167 Fillitz, Thomas, 14, 159 flight, 14, 125, 158, 166 Fluxus, 48, 53–4, 191n folk artist, 43, 45 Foster, Hal, 6 Foucault, Michel, 172, 183–4, 197n future, 30, 34, 95, 105, 108, 111, 162, 183 gauravam, 102, 107, 117 Geetha, 97, 109–10, 114, 117 Gell, Alfred, 116, 172, 188n gender, 47, 89, 105, 116, 119

Index

Gibson, James, 9, 191n gift, 8, 100, 116–17 Gnaniah, Rita, 120, 126, 129 Gomadhi, 100, 102, 117 Grasseni, Cristina, 38, 188n Grimshaw, Anna, 5–6, 11, 16, 122, 188n Grønseth, Anne Sigfrid, 158 habitus, 47 Hallam, Elizabeth, 183, 194n Harbisson, Niel, 185 Harman, Graham, 13 Harris, Mark, 187n heteronormativity, 196n Henare, Amiria, 189n Higgins, Hannah, 48, 191n Hindu cosmos, 35 images, 25, 27, 35, 37–8, 40 scriptures, 112, 192n vision, 3, 24, 37, 189n Hindutva, 195n Hirsch, Marianne, 194n Hoàng Nguyeˆ˜n, Jacqueline, 88 Hockings, Paul, 188n Holbraad, Martin, 189n Howes, David, 38, 188n hybridity, 182–3 iconophobia, 2 imaging, 28, 36 immersion, 37, 39, 167 incommensurable, 55 Inden, Ronald, 116 index, 9, 172, 188n, 193n Ingold, Tim, 9–11, 15, 39, 133–4, 160, 171, 179, 184, 188n, 196n intervention, 7, 104, 118, 121, 130, 167, 176, 180 intimacy, 36 Jackson, Michael, 188n Jain, Joytindra, 43 Jeyakumar, Ezhilojan, 129, 156, 178 Kant, Immanuel, 38 Kester, Grant, 7, 56, 121, 124, 132, 134, 170–1, 181, 195n

211

Kiefer, Anselm, 191n knowledge, embodied, 45, 187n experiential, 29, 35, 37, 168, 191n kolam, 23–4 aesthetics, 176 kambi, 31, 34 pulli, 31 kolu, 109–11 Kratz, Corinne, 92–3 Krishnarajah, K., 129, 153–6 Küchler, Susanne, 188n kungumam, 27, 37 laboratory, 12, 181 labour cognitive and physical, 132 collective, 8, 55, 128, 132, 173 Lammer, Christina, 130 Latour, Bruno, 12, 28, 172, 189n Lave, Jean, 179 learning, 179 Leavy, Patricia, 15–16, 182 Lefebvre, Henri, 35 love, 43, 60, 99, 117, 193n marriage 102 MacDougall, David, 7, 188n Mahalaksmi, 105–6 making, 9–11, 13, 15, 169, 171, 181 Making Home – with five artists based in the UK, 157, 178 Marchand, Trevor, 187n Marcus, George, 2, 6, 93, 167, 188n Mark, Appuhami, 145 Markiewicz, Lily, 164–6 Marriott, McKim, 116, 190n masculine, 47 material culture, 188n, 190n materiality, 123, 167, 181 Matousch, Kristina, 42, 47–8 Mauss, Marcel, 8, 116 memory, 114, 125, 129, 139–40, 143, 157, 166, 193n Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 172 migration, 14, 42, 121, 158, 160, 182, 196n Miller, Daniel, 158, 188n Mines, Mattisson, 116, 189n

212

Index

Mitchell, W. J. T., 36 Mitter, Partha, 191n modernism, 113, 139, 155 Morton, Chris, 188n Morphy, Howard, 188n movement forward and retrospective, 9–11, 39, 133, 196n multisensorial, 39, 181 Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm, 88, 122, 175 Myers, Fred, 6, 188n

prototyping, 93 puja, 25 pure and impure, 26 queer, 183, 197n

object oriented ontology, 180 ocularcentrism, 38 Open School East, Hackney, London, 180 Ossman, Susan, 91

Rajaledchumy, Hari, 120, 125, 130, 143, 178, 182 racism, 126 Ramachandran, M. G., 26 Rancière, Jacques Ratnaraj, Aruntha, 145–7, 157, 163 Ravetz, Amanda, 5–6, 11, 16, 122, 188n Ravi Varma, Rajah, 43, 49 ready-made, 172, 174 refugee, 14, 120, 161, 178 relational antagonism, 56, 113 Renaissance, 13, 92 rhythm, 35, 39, 45, 66, 129, 174 Roberts, Nataniel, 190n romanticism, 38 Rouch, Jean, 93, 192n Rosaldo, Renato, 2–3

Palsson, Gísli, 15, 184 Palm Court Gallery, IHC, New Delhi, 42 pannadai, 139, 141, 144 Pande, Alka, 49 Panopticon, 37, 197n Paraiyar, 190n Parker, Rozsika, 46 participant observation, 10, 175 pedagogy, 185 Peterson, Nicholas, 29, 188n pey, 25 phenomenology, 5, 9, 188n photography, 3, 21, 24, 28–9, 36, 45, 106, 117, 193–4n Peirce, C. S., 193n Pink, Sarah, 124, 188n Pinney, Chris, 6–7, 106, 188n, 193n, 194n playfulness, 56, 105, 120 postmodernism, 139 poststructuralism, 134, 181 pottu, 51 Pratt, Mary Louise, 191n Prasad, Leela, 192n Priya, 99–100, 103, 108

Sansi, Roger, 7–8, 16, 133–5, 172, 188n Sartre, Jean-Paul, 172 Sassi, 101, 103, 117, 193n Schelling, Friedrich von, 38 Schneider, Arnd, 3, 5, 8, 90, 98, 120, 122, 159, 170, 188n science, 8 natural and social, 15, 92, 184 and technology, 12–13 sensorial, 7, 25 Seremetakis, Nadia, 38, 188n Selvam, Malathi, 42–4 shakti, 26, 35 Sierra, Santiago, 56, 195n Sinhalese, 121, 154, 195n skill, 9 skilled vision, 38 skin tone, 131, 194n Sontag, Susan, 193n sound, 14, 118, 166, 177 speech act, 51, 196n Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai, 188n Stelarc, 185

Nagammal, 96, 105–6, 112 Nagulendran, Rani, 124 new materialisms, 12, 180 Non-Brahmin movement, 21, 27, 195n Nowotny, Helga, 12–13

Index

stitching, 45–6, 90, 103, 143, 181 Stoller, Paul, 38, 188n Strathern, Marylin, 116 subjectivity, 134 subject and object, 6, 12, 29, 38, 116, 134, 172, 188n Sugunasabesan, Sabes, 139–41, 167, 178, 182 sumangali, 51 Sundaralingam, Anushiya, 141–3, 161

transnationalism, 182, 196n traps, 172 trauma, 124, 163, 182–3 Trawick, Margaret, 116, 193n trust, 36, 97, 115, 131, 192n

Tamil artists, 137, 177, 195n, 197n diaspora, 130, 137, 148, 158–9, 163, 189n film songs, 99–100 nationalism, 137, 143, 195n Tamil Community Centre (TCC), Hounslow, 120, 125 Tamil Liberation Tigers of Eelam (LTTE), 121, 145, 158, 161, 183, 189n Taylor, Lucien, 2, 188n Taussig, Michael, 188n teaching, 179 Tegen 2 Gallery, Stockholm, 177 textile, 45–6 theory and practice, 12, 181 thinking through making, 10, 17, 47, 164, 167 thinnai, 145, 165 third space, 16, 42, 55 Tiravanija, Rikrit, 112, 195n transdisciplinarity, 15–16, 182, 184 transformational, 10–11, 13, 160, 170, 179, 183 transformative, 6, 171, 182 transgender, 105–6

vagueness, 13, 170 Vanniyar, 28, 44 Vellala, 28, 123, 145, 194n Verhagen, Erik, 171–2 Vertovec, Steven, 182, 196n videoing, 104, 129, 138, 157, 176–7 violence, 126 visitors’ studies, 92 visual and visceral, 24, 28 visuality, 123

213

University College of Arts, Craft and Design, Stockholm, 180–1 untouchability, 28 uprootings/regroundings, 160, 177

Wastell, Sari, 189n Wenger, Etienne, 179 well-being, 27, 31, 37, 80, 163 WESSIELING, 91 whiteness, 131, 195n workshops, 96, 118 Wright, Chris, 3, 5, 8, 98, 120, 122, 159, 170, 188n writing, 24, 29, 36–7, 47, 103, 111, 139, 181 writing culture critique, 2 yantra, 38 Zagorska-Thomas, Natalia, 92