Interview
"Art is therapy and empowerment"
Giulia Ambrogi is a contemporary art curator who is committed to spreading the culture of public and urban art. In 2014, she co-founded St+art India Foundation, India’s first platform for urban contemporary art.
By Faizal Khan
How does public art help make sense of a world paralyzed by the Covid-19 pandemic?
Art at large has the capability of activating imagination. Art also picks up something from the real and translates it into a possibility for the future and an interpretation of the past and the present. In general, it acts as a therapy. It is also an empowerment somehow, thinking of something different and having the power of thinking. Specifically about public art and Covid-19, what happened is that we were in this unprecedented condition of being stuck in our homes and became more and more addicted to social media and online communication. It meant having a non-physical understanding of our surroundings, ourselves, and others. In that sense public art is amazing because there is the air, it is not an enclosed space. It keeps the physicality. It is almost like giving back to the city its life, through murals, through the possibility of going out, meeting people and seeing the art in your own city. And sort of reappropriating your own public space through peaceful and meaningful activities of togetherness.
Has the pandemic brought in or forced any changes in the process and practice of street art in India?
Of course. The world stopped for everybody, except for frontline workers. We were also working during the pandemic when the restrictions were lifted. For instance, we have done murals dedicated to Covid-19 warriors amongst others. Of course it changed because there were no international artists and artists from outside the cities where we were working because of travel restrictions. It is interesting how we make the most out of limitations that can open up new experiments. What really changed was the collective experience, the larger interaction with the communities and having the condition of creating a festival with more artists. That changed enormously. The work was still valid. So we started engaging with the community on social media.
What were the factors that you chose Delhi and Chennai as the two-city venues for GT #Murals?
There is a mix of reasons. One is that we are talking about travel, and we thought it was nice to pick up one of the southern-most cities of India and one of the northern-most cities. We wanted to establish links within a country as big as a continent. Also, we have our art districts in both cities. We thought it was a good idea to plug this project into the larger project in Kannagi Nagar in Chennai because of the larger engagement with the community. We thought a project in a greater frame would be beneficial for everybody —viewer, public, artists, and for the sake of the project in general.
How were the two artists, Greta and Aashti, selected for GT #Murals?
There were a few criteria. On the one hand, we selected artists we thought had a strong compositional mature expression. You see the portfolio of the artists, that they have been working consistently on new topics and have had the capability of developing a strong composition both in terms of form and content. That was the first criterion. We selected 30 participants and from there we started looking at who were the Indian participants that could match with the German participants. Of course, you can't choose based on style which is absolutely alien to one another. It will look like a crazy juxtaposition. In that sense, there could have been different strategies. There could have been the strategy of saying let's go for the crazy juxtaposition. But we felt the encounter of artistic vision would have been a little awkward. Finally, we shortlisted four. Two of them had already done some murals and were both men. The other two were talented emerging artists who had never done a mural, and were women. We thought about that association and liked it a little better. We thought of facilitating a medium that was so different from what they used to do. And that is where we found that Aashti and Greta would be a good team. So far it seems to be working very well. They had a smooth process of mutual understanding moving to the ideation and conceptualisation of the sketch, and then to the sketch itself. The whole process has been smooth, I would say, with very good results from what I can see from the sketches now. I guess it was the right call.
Could you briefly explain how the work of St+art India Foundation has contributed towards the formation of several art districts in India?
It was thanks to a very good network of stakeholders. We proposed the first two art districts – Lodhi art district and Mahim art district – to the government. The others are Maqta in Hyderabad, Kannagi Nagar and Ukkadam in Tamil Nadu, and Panjim. We selected places we thought were interesting spots within cities. We thought the cities were missing in offering a proposal that was open to all, democratic, accessible, and contemporary. These were in the centre of the cities, but unexplored. Lodhi is such a beautiful colony, it is not gated and is green. It is pedestrian-friendly, whereas in Delhi, you can't walk almost anywhere. It was about how to utilise our spaces, make them public and culturally relevant. Once we launched the Lodhi art district, we found that we needed opportunities to extend the same format in other cities. I think in each city, there are different senses and dynamics. It is something for everybody. Everybody finds a different importance to it.
What defines an art district in the Indian cultural context?
To be very honest, we always need labels. It is a label that we at St+art India Foundation gave because we had to call it something. What do you call it? A bunch of murals? That would not have been right. We chose the label of art district because it basically is a district with a lot of art. It was the easiest of labels to operate under. On top of that, our forte so far has been mural-making. We are renowned for murals, whereas we do many more things like installations, community-based projects, performances, dance, and music. Mural is the main thing that we plug into the art district because it is the tangible trace that you see. We don't want to be restricted in thinking about what an art district is. In Kannagi Nagar, we were trying to open a local network. We spoke with Chennai Photo Biennale (they have done great workshops in Kannagi Nagar) and Urban Design Collective (they have also done amazing work in the art district). Then we left, but they are still there. They have been working in Kannagi Nagar for the last three years. So we don't want to define what an art district is. What we do is trigger. Then it becomes a place where new ideas and new imaginations are born. Anything can happen there.