Leaf 10
The Shape of Work
[Amol K. Patil, Unit 13, Santa Fe Village]
© Photo: Brad Trone. Courtesy of SITE SANTA FE International
I was a woman without a map looking for evidence everywhere. Must one break into, or behind, the vintage façade? Tellingly, no small blue Site Santa Fe poster posted. Standing outside what tourist literature optimistically -termed an “eclectic, historic shopping center,” the mystery clearly was how to enter. Rambling, and veering towards total tumble-down, Santa Fe Village is an “Old West” nostalgic strip dotted with a scatter of adjacent “boutiques” stocked with fetishes, boots, jewelry, carvings, and collectibles. Crooked hand-lettering festoons the roofline and spicy scents waft from the neighborhood India Palace Restaurant.
Somehow, the visitor must find a luckily open store, and a friendly merchant who willingly guides lost souls into the building’s concealed interior via the back of his or her shop. Once inside the labyrinth and feeling my way past the occasional windowed walls of this low twisting corridor, I finally spotted a tucked-away, padlocked gate with no one around. My first attempt was on a Tuesday, only to find it was clamped shut. However, the sound of an invisible, repetitive voice [ later revealed as a hidden audio cassette recording the artist speaking] managed to cut through. Sallying forth again the following Monday, I saw--beyond this now unbarred entrance --the white-washed brick and naked cement “gallery.” It consists of three irregular and raw rooms punctuated by lone bronzes set stage-like on the uneven industrial floor. A haunting atmosphere is established at the very beginning. In the center of the first, foundry-evoking room, the visitor is greeted by a flaring vat-like mound. A bare light bulb suspended from the ceiling rises and falls into the crevice spilling shadow or speeding light across the broken floor.
Looking at the deliberately dismembered work of Conceptual artist, Amol K. Patil, arouses what cognitive scientist, Andy Clark, calls: “the feeling of what happens.” This factory-like space in Santa Fe is enlisted to evoke “chawl” architecture—a notable type of early affordable urban housing [whose Indian communal origins date to the late- nineteenth and early -twentieth century]. The dual character of such compounds for working and living were fine-tuned by migrant mill and factory workers into a socially- networked environment of mutuality.
Patil evokes quality of life and sense of place through the materiality of laboring bodies—textured ashen gray and brown like sinewed skin during the bronze casting process. These human examples of grounded sustainability appear scoured by Mumbai’s swept-up street dust and debris. Pendant relief sculptures of muscled legs or arms erupt here and there. In the back window rest a pair of bronze dirt-filled shoes and in the triangular niche below lurks an amorphous human mass reaching with delicate fingers upward and downward. A deformed spine writhes in distortion.
This physical rhetoric of manual labor is painfully articulated by tangible gestures echoing throughout the design and place-making of the surrounding architecture. As the artist repeats in the voiceover: “This is not a performance.” The whitewashed walls bear shape-shifting fragments. These scattered enlarged cutouts from, my guess, nineteenth-century engravings were scissored from illustrated travel accounts. Our searching eyes take in a male torso with palm raised in a gesture of teaching, an arm lifted above a sleeping head, bare hands cupped, clenched, partially open, or barely surfacing from an edge.
These corporeal puzzle-bits—affixed to white plasterboard—create an existential atmosphere of public and private design with unforeseen consequences. Not just the misery, but the heroism, of black and brown bodies haphazardly torn from the possibility of a complete life working to construct a full life. Now building,not just to remake the past, but to envision a feasible and improved present.
© Photo: Brad Trone. Courtesy of SITE SANTA FE International