A Kolam for the Cooum

 

Collecting garbage for the kolam (Courtesy of the Hindu)

    In the works for two years, “DAMned Art” would bring thousands of people to a public art exhibition on the banks of the Cooum, one of the three major rivers that run through Chennai. All reek of untreated sewage and are littered with discaded plastic bottles, shoes and other trash. Artists from Germany and India designed site-specific installations that would reacquaint visitors with Chennai’s waterbodies and encourage them to come together to reclaim them.   

“The citizens of Chennai have turned away from the damage done to their rivers and water. ‘It’s the Cooum,’ we say, not acknowledging it as a river, it’s just an expression of disgust,” writes the director of the Goethe-Institute which partnered with the nonprofit Embrace Our Rivers. “Our vision was to make people turn around, face the river and embrace it.” Here’s the exhibition website: http://embraceourrivers.in/programmes/public-art-awareness/ City officials denied permission for the riverside exhibition on the grounds that “the area is extremely fragile environmentally.”   

The project, which included four weeks of concerts, films, lectures and other programs, was forced to move inside to the Lalit Kala Akademi, an arts institution. There, the gardens, fountains and structures envisioned by artists and architects were mostly confined to design plans, drawings and documentation of what might have been. Visitors were challenged to envision the installations as well, which arguably gave more meaning to the foiled exhibition.

One artist managed to bring the Cooum inside the Akademi. Chennai-based Parvathi Nayar, and volunteers combed the putrid Cooum for trash and recovered a disgusting bounty of sandals, flip-flops, clogs, crippled toys, light bulbs, bottles, tooth brushes and more. Nayar arranged the trash into the symmetrical form of a kolam, an emblem of good fortune that many South Indian women draw every morning on their doorsteps with rice or chalk powder.  The garbage kolam exposed the city’s “extremely fragile” excuse for tabling the site-specific show.