Treehouse Project ( Click to zoom)

Tea at Tree:
Remembrance of the things past/fast

Mumbai based art organization, Open Circle recently collaborated with the Japanese artists Yoshihisa Nakano and Masayuki Yasuhara in a closely guarded ‘public’ art project at the Ecole Mondiale World School, Mumbai. Amrita Gupta Singh features the project and says it could have lived up to its name had it been in a more ‘public’ place.

Public Art projects, whether permanent or temporary, are critical interventions in the larger community. While ensuring broad public access to the arts, such projects, which largely focus on the youth, have the potential to encourage the growth and vitality of our diverse arts community, support integration of the arts into the day-to-day curriculum of schools and address student learning in, through and with the arts, thereby raising awareness of the concerns and issues of our times.
One such project, organized by the Open Circle in association with Japanese artists, Yoshihisa Nakano and Masayuki Yasuhara, at the Ecole Mondiale World School, Mumbai presented the possibilities of a collaborative workshop and interactive installation performance in the form of a Tree House built within the premises of the School. The artists run an organization, Novaia Liustra (meaning new chandeliers in Russian), which conduct activities that are inter-disciplinary in nature, investigating the conceptual paradigms of ‘border-lines’ or ‘thresholds’ between histories, cultures and nations and also the site-specific issues of the private and the public.
The Tree House Project becomes an interesting case-example when one looks at the strains and pulls of the metropolis of Bombay/Mumbai between the local and the global. Again, the choice of the site, that of an elite International School, in which an installation made of natural materials such as bamboo, stitched clothes from various cultures that carry personal histories becomes of significance here. As a temporary arts intervention, meant to be installed and dismantled, questions of modernity, mobility, memory, and migration weaved themselves within and without the installation in the experience of climbing up a bamboo ladder, amidst the space of a modern building and entering an enclosed space covered in a canopy of stitched used clothes of t-shirts, blouses, kimonos, chunnis and saris etc. A tree-house evokes memories of child-hood/pasts and the idea to use bamboo as the structural material by the artists related to the use of bamboo as scaffolding in traditional Japanese architecture, fast disappearing under the onslaught of the technology of steel, glass and other modern materials. Participants were encouraged to climb the twin ladders in to the enclosed space, and exchange ideas with the artists, but one wondered about the wider possibilities of this performative exchange, had it been installed in another public space in Bombay open to various classes of people, than the highly barricaded and security guarded premises of the elite Ecole Mondiale World School, where access is via entry passes to a particular class of society, both students and adults. Maybe, further projects could explore those dimensions as well.  
This workshop/installation is part of the Café-Liustra project, initiated by the artists in 2002. In the form of a mobile café which travels from place to place, this project took on new forms in 2003 where the idea to build a new patch-work canopy of used clothes (read as a chandelier) was given to students of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in a workshop. Since then this canopy has traveled to various places as workshop/installations in Japan and also Canada. Thus, each time the artists’ had a Café-Liustra installation, a workshop with the local community was organized where the stitched used clothes that the participants brought, were added to the parts that were made before in other cultures, initiating a sense of bonding and the ‘stitching’ of personal histories amongst various peoples, a very humanist approach, so to say. The Mumbai Tree House project is an extension of this idea, with the canopy evoking historical metaphors of individuals and communities.
This installation of the Café will be placed in the Chatterjee and Lal Gallery, Mumbai as the second phase of this project in November and tea will be served from the collection of the artists’ (1000T4U Project Collection) “to explore possibilities of sharing personal memories from a cup of tea, even without a Marcel Proust”. It would be another exploration of a space (this time private) and an inter-cultural investigation of the tradition of tea-serving in Japan.