jury day in bangalore

got back from bangalore yesterday after spending a day and half in that strange soft city. whle bombay feels like shards, bangalore is cotton. all experience is dulled by a cushion of green and clean. i was there for a jury for a group of swiss students who had spent 5 weeks developing 4 projects- to of them looked at the east bangalore railway station and the other two at a crèche / community space on a nallah.

the jury was held at the united theosophy college at benson town whose lush campus is a crime- so pastoral, it feels like being in a forest. the work was so much better than the ones i have often seen foreign students do in india. not completely able to strip themselves of the ‘exotic india’ garb, most managed to do reasonable work in spite of it. like my favorite piece where a strange notion of collective farming and the stages of an “indian” life were superimposed making a truly unusual intervention on the second site. the railway station project that did it for me was the one that proposed a “space for time and place” in front of the building which was colonized constantly by everyday life and the transformations of nature. the edge of this space was blurred by using capsules that made no inside or outside.

the kids had made the most gorgeous starters with pork and egg and mayonnaise and mushroom for the exhibition in the evening. these were the ‘process managers’ in the teams. four very golden blonde boys with exactly the same hair – each wanting to be different ended up looking the same. some things are truly ‘transcultural’ – the key word of the day.

i did not have much time to do anything much in bangalore. the previous day, as they had put me up at a hotel in koramangla, i just had to walk to forum mall there the previous evening for my dose of density and tackiness.

also met jayashree and mihiran yesterday, in the break between the jury and the exhibition.