STREET ART INITIATIVE TRANSFORMS INDIA
15 Aug 2017
With the support of the India Government, the St+Art India Foundation aims to embed art on the streets of India in a bid to reclaim the city’s civic spaces and beautify the fabric of its neighbourhoods.
The Delhi-based non-profit organisation St+India Foundation works to enhance the streets of India by emblazoning art on its urban foundations. Their most recent work in the Indian metropolises of Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru, has resulted in a popular reclamation of the city’s civic spaces and a simultaneous transformation of their urban fabric.
Primarily working within residential neighbourhoods—they are touted with the creation of the country’s first public art district in Lodhi Colony, Delhi—the foundation has also collaborated with metro-rail corporations to enliven transit-spaces.
While St+Art India’s experiments are evidently rooted in social activism and urban design, they mark a significant moment in the historic timeline of the application of street art in cities: the initiative involves what it believes to be a first-of-its-kind engagement between street artists and the government.
In a recent interview between ArchDaily and Akshat Nauriyal, Content Directory of St+Art India Foundation, Akshat shares the organisation’s purpose and the story of its journey so far.
Suneet Zishan Langar Could you explain the origins of St+Art India? What are your primary objectives?
Akshat Nauriyal Essentially, we started around 2014, with twin intents: to make public spaces more vibrant and interactive for the people who use them the most, and to make art more democratic as a medium. We have five co-founders and all of us come from very different backgrounds. I’m a filmmaker and visual artist and I have previously worked documenting the city’s emerging sub-cultures. Hanif Kureshi is an artist who has been actively involved in the street art community. Meanwhile, Arjun Bahl and Thanish Thomas have a background in events and logistics and Giulia Ambrogi worked as a curator. We all got in touch around the time of the Extension Khirkee street art festival when we found we were all in six degrees of separation wanting to do the same thing, and that’s how our first project came about in Shahpur Jat.
SZL How did you obtain permissions to install artwork on walls?
AN We sought permissions in two ways: bottom up and top down. Bottom up would mean that we went door-to-door and asked residents to permit us to paint on their walls. Some of them said no, some of them said yes, but that’s how it began. The top down approach meant that we went to authorities such as the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) and the Central Public Works Department (CPWD) or other faculties that had the rights or the ownership of the places.
Towards the end, we did this mural on the Delhi Police Headquarters, a huge portrait of Mahatma Gandhi by German artist Hendrik Beikirch and Indian artist Anpu. That was a huge moment for us in the sense that, in the historical timeline of street art in the world, graffiti if not street art has always had negative connotations of vandalism. So when we’re having street artists paint a 158-foot mural on the façade of a governmental building, that moment holds immense significance not just for the scale of work, but also for its larger relevance. This marked a first-of-its-kind engagement with the government.
SZL Where do you primarily obtain funding from?
AN We work with a lot of cultural institutions, consulates or embassies to bring artists and fund projects. So essentially, most of our projects are funded by some consulate. We work with almost 20 now such as Germany, Poland, Singapore, and Switzerland. Another major supporter is Asian Paints. A lot of the work we do requires huge infrastructure and a lot of paint, so in that sense Asian paints was a very logical match for us.
SZL How do you choose the artists that you collaborate with? Explain your work process.
AN We first synthesise the project and then work backwards to see who’s the best fit for the kind of curation we’re doing. We seek very meaningful partnerships with different organisations, whether it’s an NGO or a cultural institution, or brands and corporates for that matter. Once we finalise the artist, we primarily work with them and the style that they use.
SZL Why do you believe that democratisation of art is important?
AN We feel that art, at least the way it exists as an industry, has become marginalised only to a very small section of society, almost a novelty of the rich and the elite. We wanted to somehow break out of the regular gallery structure, because if you see the kind of footfall museums receive, it’s maybe a few hundred in a month, and that’s a high estimate. But if you flip that and look at public spaces as places to experience art, then you have thousands of people crossing these areas every day, and just in terms of the reach that the artwork can have, it's tremendous, exponentially larger than what it can have in a closed environment.
SZL How do you think this affects a community or a people?
AN I think the impact is very multifaceted and layered. Different places react differently. So we’ve seen in our experience that if we’re working in a neighbourhood, it leads to an increased sense of community pride. And it is really endearing to see people take to their own neighbourhoods, to feel ownership of their surroundings. For example, in Shahpur Jat, one of the first walls that we painted was this mural of a cat by Indian artist Anpu and it quickly became a locally recognised landmark. People started giving directions based on its location. The people who lived in that building became very well known in the community, which led to more people approaching us to paint their walls.
SZL The Lodhi Public Art District in Delhi is undoubtedly your largest urban intervention. What was the idea behind the selection of Lodhi Colony? Also, how do you think your work has altered the structure and meaning of the neighbourhood?
AN Yes, there was a very clear intent in picking Lodhi Colony. We wanted to create multiple artworks in the form of an open walkthrough gallery where people could just come and spend a few hours a day and have a good time exploring the city. So Lodhi was a natural choice. It is one of the rare places in Delhi which is pedestrian-friendly. It’s also well organised in the sense that it’s easily navigable, and it has symmetrical blocks created in a localised typology. The façades that it presented were beautiful, large and symmetric, which meant that almost every artist got a similar canvas to play with, and hence, there is a semblance of symmetry to the entire project. Moreover, its location in South Delhi and the fact that it is a residential colony were other key points. As a government-owned residential colony, it didn’t face any threat of being gentrified, so we knew that the artwork would stay on.
In terms of its impact, we witnessed that many people started feeling pride that the neighbourhood had become a place to visit on the city’s tourist map. Now when you go to Lodhi, there’s something happening on the streets all the time, whether it’s a photo shoot, or a music video, or ordinary people just having a jolly time. We did a wall in collaboration with the Swacch Bharat Abhiyan [Clean India Mission] and I remember speaking to one person who told me about a man who had stopped his car and was about to urinate on a wall when a few local people strongly objected saying, “someone’s taken the effort of painting this beautiful thing. Don’t dirty it, just go to a public toilet.” So the impact could be simple, maybe it just makes you feel better or it distracts you or it makes you think, but it could also have deeper meanings of community building or keeping the neighbourhood clean.
SZL Transit is a mundane but unavoidable part of modern city life. Do you believe your work on metro-stations will help redefine the function of transit-spaces?
AN You used a very important term, function, and we believe that our cities are built to just be functional and nothing more than that, most of the time at least. While urban design is surely evolving in our country, it still leaves a lot to be desired. Transit spaces are increasingly being used as thoroughfares, almost more than streets themselves, as more people opt to use public transport now. These become part of a routine for people and we’ve observed that they can become really inert in the way they exist. So we’re trying to bring in an element of experience to these spaces that are just functional, something that makes them more interactive. It’s about conversation, the intention is that these efforts lead to dialogue between people, whether it’s internal or external. You see an artwork, some people think, “Oh, I like it,” some people will disagree, and in the process you think, “why do I like it?” or “why don’t I like it?” or if you have a question you might just ask a person next to you, a stranger, and that starts a conversation.
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