Gram Art Project

रुई, कपडा और सम्मान! (Seed, Clothing & Stature!)
Through The Book  (2022) -  to talk about conscious consumption through Cotton to Cloth process

"रोटी, कपडा और मकान", i.e., Food, Clothing & Shelter are the basic human needs. But today, the irony of our society is such that those who are fulfilling these basic needs of others, are themselves being deprived of their basic rights. This is more so true for those involved in the cloth making process.

Cotton growers, the primary raw-material producers of our clothing, are no more in control of the रुई, the cotton seed, that they sow. Cotton cloth has become a luxury which neither these growers, nor the spinners & weavers in the cloth-making process can afford. We have robbed them of their dignified stature to an extent that they’d rather starve themselves to make sure their next generation finds a place in any other profession than theirs...

“Seed, Clothing & Stature” hopes to bring to our notice the stories involved in order to clothe our society & how do we move forward from here, some possible solutions.

The Book will be made from raw material that is grown as part of a diverse agro-ecosystem in which indigenous, non-Genetically Modified (GM), Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)-free cotton is grown organically alongside other food & feed crops. This material can include hand-spun handwoven cloth from indigenous cotton, paper made from crop-residue of Roselle, etc. This material then can be hand-printed, stamped, block-printed, hand-written, embroidered, etc. to tell different stories. It will be handmade by makers that are involved in Gram Art Project’s collective works throughout the year. 


Location: Gallery MMB, Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai

About the artist

GAP is a group of farmers, artists, women, makers, …. They are people of different ideas and identities. But the idea and identity that connects them all and makes them a collective, is that they all are living and working in and around a village and are concerned about it. This village is Paradsinga, situated in Sausar Tehsil of Chhindwara district of Madhya Pradesh, India.

Their village is just like any other Indian village, undergoing migration, people aspiring for jobs to escape the poverty ridden circle of agriculture, patriarchal, people trying to stick to their traditions & superstitions & religious beliefs, …

With this journey in the backdrop, they are trying to build our collective consciousness around understanding this journey, repercussions of it, the vitalities and the trivialities of it and be expressive while doing it. This expression comes out through their work and artworks. Sometimes these artworks take the form of landarts, sometimes they take the form of yarn artefacts made from the non-GM (Genetically Modified) IPR-free (Intellectual Property Rights) non-hybrid indigenous cotton they grow. These expressions also take the form of plantable seed papers and eatable artefacts made from the organic produce from their farms. Apart from these, they also use performance, making, etc. as other forms of expressions.

For them, art is not just a professional practice, but a way of expressing themselves in the ways they find meaningful about the things they encounter while living a rural life in Paradsinga. & that is what their collective, Gram Art Project, is about – A collective space for them to express about their concerns as a live part of an average Indian village in the forms and media which are socially and ecologically non-exploitative.