Participatory art, poorly conceptualised

Whoever was walking along Gulshan-Mohakhali Road on last Friday afternoon was compelled to step down the footpath or change roadside, as a dense group of people gathering around a TV-team fully occupied the sideway in correspondence of Gulshan Bridge. The TV professionals wanted to know from a young man, whose profession or passion as a photographer was revealed by the expensive photo-camera hanging from his neck, what was going on on the stagnant waters of Banani Lake. A small orange-and-yellow armada with young people wearing safety jackets onboard was crisscrossing the lake; among the passengers, imparting indications, a few foreigners stood out. They didn't wear any safety jackets though.

The young man, standing in his bordeaux shirt before the greyish backdrop of Karail Basti's tin shed houses, explained that the artists' intention was to pass the messages of those who live in the basti on to the "outside people" who look at it from the road. Around him and the small crowd of cameramen and curious passersby, Karail's inhabitants climbed the slope between landing place and street up and down, without bothering or being bothered by the mess. Alike, the black boats filled with people in colourful clothes continued to form an ordered line between the main road and the southern access to the basti. The policemen watched the scene from their blue-yellow-brown maculated checkpoint, whose walls were being scratched by a single man. Soon, he would start painting them afresh: a much needed intervention after the monsoon. For some reason, my eyes kept following a woman moving an over-dimensional load of waste – assumedly plastic and wood packed in two or three bosta (propylene sacks) stitched together. All alone, she slowly transferred it from the roadside to the lake's shore and into the slim boat that would eventually carry it to the other side. There, the contents would be sorted out and processed in one of hundreds recycling workshops…

Myself onboard, I asked the other passengers for information about the activities on the lake. "A few foreigners were here a few times, they took photos, videos"; "It's about the poor, so many poor live in Bangladesh"; "It's about eye diseases, you know there are a lot of people who suffer under eye diseases in Bangladesh". In fact, on many of the black-and-white photo posters that were being arduously fixed on facades and rooftops of Karail's huts, there were eyes and in particular, female eyes. Roundish or longish, all had long eyelashes; some stared at a far away point, in others, the shadow of a smile created a glimpse of intimacy. Once I reached my friends' home, their six-year-old daughter excitedly reported her experience on the boat with the bideshi. Yet the initiative did not target Karail's children, nor mothers or motherhood, as I finally got to know from the international team that was directing the works partly on the lake, partly from a tea-stall on Gulshan-Mohakhali Road, via walkie-talkies.

This art project – the Bangladesh chapter of a worldwide series of photographic installations (see: www.insideoutproject.net/en), carried out in cooperation with Dhaka-based Counter Foto and with funds from the TED Prize – should remind people in Dhaka of the thousands of garment workers that struggle for a life and for fairer labour conditions in  the country, declared one of the involved artists, a photographer and reporter from California, US. "After Rana Plaza, they contacted us and we offered our support. I've just dropped in to see what's going on, I actually don't know where they all are coming from", added Korvi Rakshand. His well-connected organisation, Jaago Foundation, must have represented an ideal contact point for the American artists when, vis-à-vis the appalling tragedies of Rana Plaza and Tazreen Fashions, they decided to visit Bangladesh and work out an art project to raise awareness on the issue.

Now, what is so remarkable about an American-Bangladeshi group of artists producing an artwork with the support of the organisation that displays probably the highest social-media competence in this country? Nothing, on the one hand. Neither the artwork, nor the multilateral cooperation that facilitated it would be actually worth mentioning in a time of proliferating bi-lateral so-called participatory art projects. On the other hand, exactly the "nothingness" of the outcome – a few black-and-white posters, collages of photo-portrays or overscale female faces, quite oddly installed along Karail Basti's lakefront two days before departure for the US – urges a reflection.

First of all, one concerning the approaches of art and in particular, participatory art. Who participated: the portrayed women from Karail Basti, or the Bangladeshi artists and activists contacted by the US initiators? While latter may have interacted with the American artists and influenced the project, the women were merely chosen as subjects for the scope of the installation. They were neither asked to take photographs on their own, nor involved in the design of the final installation. Worse: by the way they were abstracted away from the context the art project pretends to thematise – that of garment factories – and their faces fixed onto the rusty walls of shabby-looking tin shed huts, they have been eventually turned into bare objects. An uncanny turn! What should have dignified women in their struggle for recognition, as women and as labourers, actually ended up rendering them as greyish figures populating the likewise colourless palimpsest of Karail. One does not understand, by the way, why in such an immensely colourful setting, where even the police checkpoint is repainted in bright colours, the artists opted for black-and-white photos.

A second urgent comment regards the way Karail Basti itself has been used for the scope of an art installation that, dealing with garment factories, may have taken place in hundreds of other places, starting from, to make just the most obvious example, Savar. Indeed, Karail is the home to many garment workers in Dhaka. But, apart from the logistic and publicity advantages of choosing a site in the middle of the city as project location, it is evident that here, this specific basti's scenic, suggestive outlook is being reproduced and marketed with at least worrying mindlessness. Neither the artists nor Jaago activists (who are running a school in Karail) apparently minded to project on a squatter settlement that has been the object of repeated eviction drives and of negative, all over poorly informed, debates in public opinion an additional negative image: that of exploitation of women in Bangladesh. The choice of the lakefront for the photography installation corroborates the feeling that the involved artists did not engage with the basti. Had they gone beyond its exterior outlook, had they taken time to understand the complexity and vibrancy of its everyday life, they would have gathered a different idea and probably, chosen another presentation form for their artwork.

Karail Basti does not need suggestive representations by Bangladeshi and international voyeurs any further. Nor do its dwellers ask for compassion. Rather, their struggle for recognition and legalisation would be benefited by positive narratives that highlight their improvements of the basti's infrastructure, based on self-organisation, their contributions to the city (from recycling to providing labour force), and their will to be part of Dhaka. The garment workers (female and male) too, I guess, would prefer to be considered as living and striving individuals rather than being reduced to black-and-white surfaces hanging from tin shed huts.

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Elisa T. Bertuzzo is the principal investigator of "Archives of Movement", a research project on circular migrants life-stories in Bangladesh and West Bengal.