Subject: Allied Design.
Mentor: Rupali Gupte.
Bricolage is the skill of using whatever is at hand and recombining them to create something new. It is the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be at hand.
In order to understand the methods of working of a Bricoleur, various works were referenced by looking at the aesthetics, mechanics, politics and spatiality of bricoleur’s practices along with the biography of the bricoleurs through examples in Art and architecture. Thus building a Bricolage diary to store all the references we come across during the process .
Simultaneously we started recognizing our own practices of repair or had a chance of repair.
Going on derives through the city as Bricoleur, helps in identifying other bricoleurs and their practices. Documenting their practices, forms of inhabitation in the bricoleur diary. We started the process of making as a bricoleur by building a dairy for ourselves that responded our practice of repair. The dairy was a companion everywhere from note taking in class to sketches of derives to referencing and diagraming.
BUILDING THE GARDEN TO COLLECT ALL THE INDIVIDUAL WORKS OF BRICOLAGE:
We had to create a space where all of our individual works can come together and hence the idea of a garden came into picture. We asked the question 'What is a Garden?' to further continue.
Rupali Gupte our mentor asked us to make quick one minute - two minute sketches of what we envisioned in the garden, so that was our step 1 towards making the garden. Below are the few sketches made during the class by us.
Homely and the Unhomely : Homeliness is about intimacy, comfort, memories and associations. But what does it mean to be unhomely? What is the feeling of being unhomely? The idea of unhomely is explored by creating an experience of an uncanny, unfamiliar, uncomfortable ghostly looking home.
Image of everyday objects of home such as mirror, photo frames, vessels etcetera used in the uncanny house made by us.
Image of a library, where the books are not organized and kept inside a book shelf. The library was imagined to not be standardized and hence are hung on a clothes line with a clip, breaking all the known or standardized ways of seeing a library.
A sitting made in the garden through the method of bricolage.
THE GHOSTLY HOUSE:
The ghostly house was the bricolage of our works.
It had everyday objects of house but were made in an uncanny way, like for example the comfortable bed of our houses was replaced with the concrete bed in the ghostly house.
The roof of the house was inspired by the landscape of 'Dhobi ghat'.
In Dhobi ghat people after washing the clothes, hang them on the ceiling of a house and they later sleep under it, 'family and friends' all of them under one roof. The wet clothes provide coolness to them.
The Feast: Food can be a great medium through which one can communicate and interact. It can even be a great medium to make friends. Cooking for someone else, eating together, having conversations while having food all of it is essential for building relationships.
We can even get acquainted with the cultural history of a place through its food. So it won't be wrong to say that 'Food carries history'.
Smit Lakkad one of our group members went to different places of Mumbai to try various food items and know the history or stories about it and the place. Hence the idea of the feast table came into picture.
Again we decided to break the usual standards and dimensions of the dining table and decided to make a wire frame feast table which was imagined from the drawing below:
Some of the chairs used for this also included the individual practices of someone. Like for example some had crochet on them and some had weaving.
The food here was brought from different places of Mumbai through the derives.
During the course of 4 weeks we had a lot of fun along with learning and unlearning. We had a potluck and also played Dixit cards to get to know each other better.
Hansika Nagare wearing clothes made by her. She had collected various scraps of clothes available at hand and stitched them together. Stitching clothes was her individual practice.
Gallery:
Group members: Radhika Choksi Ananya Khandagle Kaumudi Karwande
Aditi Kawade Krisha Kothari Neha Dalvi
Jinal Trivedi Prajwal Deshmukh Vivek Khuthiya
Eesha Pethe Neel Shah Smit Lakkad
Vijay Chavan Tanuja Vartak Devvrat Singh Chauhan
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