silent voices

silent voices

Reena Tiwari, Katherine Ashe, Dianne Smith

CONTENTS Part 1 Curators’ essay Part 2 Silent Voices – An immersive journey Part 3 Invited Essays The rhythms of habit, the rhythms of place by Professor Tim Edensor The song of silence: A rumination by Smita Bharti Part 4 A Visual story PUBLICATION: November 12, 2017 EXHIBITION: November 12, 2017 at Kidogo Gallery, Fremantle, Australia. School of Built Environment, Curtin University

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Mark Robertson for contributing to the film editing. We acknowledge the financial support provided by the Australia Asia Pacific Institute, Curtin University. Thanks to Indian Rural Education and Development (IRead), Lakhnu administration and Lakhnu 2016 Curtin University students for support during the fieldwork. We appreciate the direction provided by Smita Bharti Theatre group for the performative installations at Lakhnu. And finally a big thanks to the residents of Lakhnu for their hospitality, understanding and cooperation. ‘Sense of Taste’ provided by Copper Chimney, Fremantle. Wine by Grape and Grain

About the curators: Reena Tiwari, a Professor at Curtin University is an author of Performativity in city: ritual, body, space and a co-editor of M2 Models & methodologies for community engagement. She has directed the Lakhnu sustainable development project in India since 2009. She is an ongoing scholar since 2010 for the International Cooperation Program of the European Union under the prestigious Erasmus Mundus umbrella and supported by UNESCO and UN Habitat. Katherine Ashe, a lecturer in Architectural Design at Curtin University is also a co-founder and Director of vittinoAshe Architects. Her interest is in sitespecific and responsive investigations of people and place. Katherine has previously worked in Central Australia on Indigenous projects and continues these relationships. Dianne Smith, an adjunct Associate Professor at Curtin University is a co-editor and co-author of Occupation: ruin, repudiation and revolution, Perspectives on social sustainability and interior architecture and M2 Models & methodologies for community engagement. She has piloted number of initiatives for the Lakhnu sustainable development Project in India since 2009.

PART 1 Curators’ Essay SILENT VOICES Being silenced can be a disempowering experience. However, in silences we may come to understand aspects of life that are often occupied with daily chatter or white noise. A sensitivity to alternative modes of telling stories, communicating emotions, or gaining insights opens up opportunities. These actions may facilitate relationships and/or change through the understandings which emerge. With an objective of investigating the power of non-verbal communication strategies, this immersive exhibition offers such an opportunity in regard to the key issues around sanitation and health in the Indian village of Lakhnu. Two key issues for the people who live in villages such as Lakhnu is the absence of toilet and clean water as well as the lack of access to knowledge concerning hygiene and sanitation. These are phenomena that we take for granted in our local communities. In rural India there has been a recent shift to motivate residents to adopt practices which will impact on their daily lives and consequently health. ‘Individual and households‫ ׳‬motivations to build and use toilets [is more] to do with comfort, convenience, status, privacy, and dignity than with perceived public health benefits’. (Evans, 2005; Jenkins and Scott, 2007; Jenkins and Curtis, 2005; Jenkins and Sugden, 2006; Peal et al., 2010 in (O’Reilly and Louis 2014) Therefore it becomes important to inform the community and individuals of poor sanitation and its local impact, in a way that they can engage and relate with the issues. One way is nonverbal active performances; in this way everyone can share equally with the information regardless of education, age, gender, or social standing. The message relates to each person.

In countries such as Australia, mainstream society is in a privileged position compared to large sections of the world population. So how do we raise awareness of the local communities of the plight of some many distant peoples? Again we can turn to non-verbal means. Challenging our normal modes of communication at a time of information overload seems particularly relevant. The taken for granted ways of being in our world can be challenged by being exposed to others’ circumstances. The current exhibition provides a platform for the audience to engage and participate with such issues in their own surroundings. We believe that an immersive exhibition as a non-verbal mode can operate on a number of levels. Potentially it can afford the audience a participatory role of being at one with the object of study (immersive exhibits in this case). We hypothesize that during this process, participants would involuntarily synchronize the self-rhythm (their body rhythms) with the rhythms or patterns inherent in the object. This synchronization would aid them in establishing an enriched understanding of the object – its nature and the issues – over and above the traditional roles of viewer or audience. In the latter the exhibit and its contents are more able to be objectified or at an arm’s distance. The body of work presented in “Silent Voices” builds on Lefebvre’s pursuit to re-establish sensory perception in order to grasp the intricacies of the social life that we encounter, as they unfold in the built environment. Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is [rhythm] (Lefebvre 2002, p. 16). The understanding of spatial rhythms or patterns established because of people’s everyday practices goes beyond visual and includes listening out, feeling movements and experiencing the hidden (Lefebvre, 2002). Previous research has established that facilitating sense making in human communication is managed with rhythmic synchronization of sound, visuals and body (Gill, 2012). Each person has an internal individual rhythm and when this is synchronized with other rhythms, a mutual adaptation of rhythmic beat occurs (Himberg, 2011). The self-synchronization with external spatial rhythms leads to sharing a tacit level of understanding (Gill, 2004). The sensorial connectedness shifts the participant from just cognitively interpreting the exhibits to being within the exhibit. As a way to challenge the everyday understandings of the issues embedded in the works, this immersive disruption to traditional exhibition attendance potentially challenges the participants to experience bodily the content of Lakhnu, as well as their own lifestyle in an Australian urban setting and their role in a global conversation about equity and sanitation that may lead to action.

References Gill, S.P. (2004). Body moves and tacit knowing. In: Gorayska B, Mey JL (eds) Cognition and technology: co-existence, convergence, and co-evolution. Amsterdam: John Benjamin. pp 241– 266 Himberg, T. (2011). Interacting with responsive and non-responsive tapping partners. In: 13th international rhythm perception and production workshop, Leipzig 13–15th July, p. 32 Lefebvre, H. (2002). Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday translated by Elden, S., Moore, G. et al. O’Reilly, K. & Elizabeth, Louis, E. (2014) The toilet tripod: Understanding successful sanitation in rural India. IN: Health & Place, Volume 29, September 2014, Pages 43-51.

PART 2 Silent Voices – An immersive journey

The Context: Surveys at Lakhnu from previous years had highlighted the scarcity of private and public toilet facilities, and the widespread continued practice of open defecation. A program was developed with the goal of educating the community about the impacts of open defecation and poor sanitation. Curtin University in collaboration with students from the BN College of Architecture (BNCA) in Pune choreographed a theatrical mime piece which was performed through the streets of the rural village, Lakhnu. Integrating students from the Lakhnu junior school, the performance was used to draw the attention of the audience with an intention of raising awareness of the issue of sanitation. The play drew a large crowd and a brief survey of the audience at its completion indicated that the message on problems associated with open defecation and lack of personal hygiene was communicated effectively. 'Testing non-verbal modalities in an Australian context' is an extension on the above work at Lakhnu. The immersive experience for the participants is curated as a journey through three different sequential sets. Arrival at each set requires a threshold to be crossed from the previous set. The three thresholds take the participant through three stages of preparation, immersion and completion. These stages involve engagement in cultural practices specific to Lakhnu /India. Removal of shoes prepares the participant for a total engagement with the space. Cleaning hands implies crossing over the impure territory. Co-creating a ‘rangoli 1’ with a pinch of colour after the last set marks completion by constructing symbolic clean and pure space. The first set of exhibits presents the locational context where participants’ perception is informed by the aural sense. Here soundscape as a recognizable assemblage of sounds becomes significant in revealing the everyday rhythms of Lakhnu. The second set of exhibits relies on a sensual aesthetic achieved through almost static ghost-like human sculptures which reference the theatrical mime piece that was performed in Lakhnu for the community. The intention here is to offer a performative aesthetic using light and visual displays, which participants perceive through the mode of praxis. The exhibit invites participants to move their bodies in certain ways, thus allowing for a synchronization of self-rhythms with those present within the set. There is also a potential of introducing new rhythms through the participants’ body movements. It is hoped that participants would have gathered an understanding of the issues that were being conveyed through the exhibits by the time they cross the last threshold. They would have observed, listened and bodily-engaged with the exhibits. They would have constructed their own interpretations based on the aural, 1

Rangoli derived from the Sanskrit word ‘rangavalli’ is an art form signifying beauty, auspiciousness, spirituality and cleanliness shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/4605/7/07_chapter%201.pdf

visual and haptic rhythms. They would be ready to move into the third set where they can co-relate their interpretations of the issues with those meant to be conveyed by the curators. The third set is a gathering of all senses – a coming together of aural, visual and body aesthetics – and is played out in full, however in an Australian context. Participants’ interpretations are captured through an interactive process to assess the success of immersive exhibition as a non-verbal mode of communication. The significance of the project lies in the fact that as researchers, tourists, professionals and NGOs, we are often in situations limited by language barriers, educational barriers, cultural barriers, or other restrictions to communicating important information or identifying understandings. This study seeks to explore alternative modes to enhance communication. The findings will: a. Communicate to a Western population the issues and associated conditions of a rural Indian village in a non-verbal manner b. It will add to the research on non-verbal modalities thereby improving those utilized in the future

PART 3 Invited Essay THE RHYTHMS OF HABIT, THE RHYTHMS OF PLACE Situated amidst richly afforested environment interspersed with green swathes of agricultural land, I recently spent a few days with Dom at his father’s rather remote farm in Gippsland, enjoying the splendid views of Wilson’s Promontory from its veranda, and the birds and wombats that gathered at dusk. Dom is an environmental activist and has persuaded his dad to let him plant native, more sustainable trees across the property. He has also constructed what has become known as the ‘poodium’. Situated 50 metres away from the house, this wooden structure is designed with stairs that lead to a toilet in which waste to fertilise the land is collected’. While the practice of visiting this outside toilet was initially disconcerting and unfamiliar, it did not take very long before the mundane, everyday act of defecation was enhanced by the views and the surrounding fresh air. Upon returning to the city, sequestered once more in the water closet, I missed this newly acquired habit and longed for the open air dunny. This episode revealed to me that visiting the toilet, usually an unreflexive practice, is thoroughly shaped by cultural and social forces. It became clear that what had always seemed natural, common sense and obvious, was a matter of social convention that had hardened into a habit. So it is with all toilet practices, including those addressed in this exhibition. A moment’s reflection highlights how our everyday experience is fundamentally grounded in rhythmic habits, including rhythms through which we rise and sleep, brush our teeth, shop, exercise, watch television, eat and drink. Theses habits are not merely individual but are usually widely shared, part of common sense understandings about how everyday practices should be carried out. As Frykman and Löfgren (1996: 10-11) emphasise, ‘cultural community is often established by people together tackling the world around them with familiar manoeuvres’, and everyday social life is structured according to the ways in which individuals synchronise their activities with others (Edensor, 2017). Friends, work colleagues and family members share habitual routines through which they eat, watch television, play sport, take tea and coffee breaks, go on holiday, attend cultural events and worship, inscribing patterns of gathering and moving across urban space. Regular paths and points of spatial and temporal intersection mark these synchronic patterns across familiar shared space (Edensor and Bowdler, 2015). Shops, bars, cafes and garages are meeting points at which individual paths congregate, providing geographies of communality and continuity within which social activities are coordinated. Such shared rhythmic patterns and practices are rarely discussed; they are beyond that which can be spoken about because they are so embedded in unreflexive, everyday habit. These banal practices are not only unreflexively enacted but are often underpinned by particular cultural values. Advice about when to go to bed and how long to sleep, the forms and quantities of exercise we should undertake in order to remain healthy, and what we should and should not eat masquerade as common sense forms of expert knowledge but are often underpinned by moral, religious and political notions. What constitutes a ‘good habit’ is often laid down by the state. Indeed, forms of power seek to shape the rules and conventions about when particular practices should take place; as Lefebvre insists, the powerful know very well how to ‘utilise and manipulate time, dates, time-tables’ (2004: 68). In some cases, such practise might be regarded as oppressive, ordering bodies to perform rituals that consolidate their own subservience to power, and are all the more powerful because they are usually unreflexively performed. In such instances, Lefebvre draws attention to what he calls ‘dressage’, the disciplining of the body through repetitive rhythms to produce automatic movements, akin to the ways in which horses are trained to perform particular and precise movements.

While the training of bodies may produce disciplined and obedient bodies, compliant with military and industrial power, it can also be productive in developing good habits. Lefebvre declares that for change to occur, ‘a social group, a class or a caste must intervene by imprinting a rhythm on an era, be it through force or in an insinuating manner’ (2004: 14). The intervention in Lakhnu is gentler and smarter than this. The intention is to transform everyday toilet practices, encourage those performing ‘bad habits’ to undertake new rhythmic procedures that will become equally automatic over time. In this case, dressage has proved useful in attempting to undo unreflexive everyday practices and replace them with better habits that can produce shared routines. Also critical is the strategy of revealing the usual everyday toilet habits, practices that were not previously a matter for reflection or discussion. It has been subsequently disclosed that they are not a useful practice grounded in common sense but are harmful to environment, sanitation and health. As Frykman and Löfgren explain, once such a habit has been revealed, it becomes ‘something on which one must take up a stance, whether to kick the habit or to stick tenaciously to it’ (1996: 14). I doubt that many of those participating in the exercise will insist that the older, previously unquestioned habits are better once they have become aware about their harmful impacts. In thinking more broadly about the rhythms of place beyond rhythmic social practices, we can consider how they collectively contribute to a polyrhythmic ensemble that reproduces regular patterns and consistencies, a backdrop to everyday life. Some of the constituents of this ensemble include the rhythms of weather, light, animals and plants that contribute to an everyday sensory familiarity with the places in which we live. Individuals become habituated to regular sights, textures and smells, sensory experiences that pervade the familiar environments of homes, neighbourhoods, routes and events. We inhabit a sensory world to which we become attuned, and after a while we only notice local sensations when they are no longer there – or when we return after a spell away from home. One especially potent way in which we come to belong to place is in our attunement to the rhythmic soundscape that saturate everyday experience. The sonic rhythms of place intersect with the collective and individual rhythms of routines and scheduling. Consider the heavy beat of monsoon rains and the bursts of tropical thunder, the recurrent cries of birds, the pulsing beat of crickets, and the croaking repetitions of frogs, human chatter and the cries of streettraders, the racket produced by traffic, the regular chiming of temple bells and blasts of recorded Bollywood tunes. These rhythms change throughout the day, with rush hour traffic and the hubbub of schoolchildren surging through streets in the early morning, the relative quiet that follows and the sounds and movements of those seeking and eating lunch. Brandon Labelle (2008) labels this alignment with the rhythms of place a form of ‘auditory scaffolding’, and the exhibition organisers provide this aural context as a backdrop to which visitors can become attuned to the sonic rhythms of a place with which they are unfamiliar. By immersing them in this soundscape, they immediately acquire a sense of place and perhaps this will also encourage them to consider the qualities of the everyday soundscape to which they are habituated. By foregrounding rhythm as a key element through which to understand place, this exhibition shows how change can be induced in settings that initially appear time bound, mired in unchanging traditions, beliefs and practices. For sure, rhythmic routines provide a framework through which to carry out everyday living. It would be unbearable - or impossible - to continually reflect upon or question every action we undertake. The polyrhythmic ensemble of place provides a comforting backdrop to daily life, a familiar sense of belonging, and shared social rhythms provide a sense of community. Yet everyday practice is also continuously improvised, so rather than considering rhythms to solely articulate repetitive and oppressive routines, they are also full of potential. As Lefebvre claims, ‘there is always something new and unforeseen that introduces itself into the repetitiveness: difference’ (2004: 6). The rhythmic sanitary and toilet practices of Lakhnu can thus be replaced by more progressive routines and procedures.

Professor Tim Edensor from the Manchester Metropolitan University is the author of Tourists at the Taj (1998), National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (2002), Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (2005) and From Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination and Gloom (2017) as well as the editor of Geographies of Rhythm (2010). References Edensor, T. and Bowdler, C. (2015) ‘Site-specific dance: revealing and contesting the ludic qualities, everyday rhythms and embodied habits of place’, Environment and Planning A, 47: 709-726 Edensor, T. (2017) ‘Rhythm’, in M. Jayne and K. Ward (eds) Urban Theory: New Critical Perspectives, London: Routledge Labelle, B. (2008) ‘Pump up the bass: Rhythm, cars and auditory scaffolding’, The Senses and Society, 3(2): 187–204. Lefebvre, H. (2004) Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. S. Elden and G. Moore, London: Continuum.

The Song of Silence: A Rumination “Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.” Susan Sontag The morning mist makes it difficult to make out the shapes of the approaching bodies, as clad in white overalls they walk through the narrow mud road to the beat of a drum, their spines erect, their eyes fixed, their bodies’ fluid, their steps matching, and their lines intact. Soon they are surrounded with a cluster of colorful, giggling, excited, chattering children as they lead this performance into their narrow village lanes. Women stop working and line the doorways opening into the lanes, men stop smoking their hookahs, and stand up lazily to watch this bizarre procession walking through their lives, and follow out of sheer curiosity. The procession pauses in front of a small village square, and is almost urged into the square and into the next act by the sheer force of the crowding audience, as it pans itself out in a circle around the performers and settles down with anticipation. The silence is palpable, except for the rhythmic drum beat. The performers pan out from their straight formations into beautifully and organically sculpted moves as they create illustrations around hygiene and sanitation in slow motion. The audience is in synch. The usual chatter and sniggers have faded as the audience and performers breathe the same breath, in rhythm. The silent communication is intense. The eye contacts are compelling. The audience is spell bound with what is unfolding in front of them. The aesthetic representation of the everyday, ignored, mundane ritual of life. And then it’s as if sheer force of will invites the audience into the performance, as the villagers start emulating the performers through the six steps of hand washing, first following and then in unison. Almost as if a transfer of power has taken place from performer to viewer. From performance to life. The circle is complete. In silence. Smita Bharti is a Writer, Director & Social Activist with a focus on Social Engineering through Mainstream Entertainment. She has worked extensively with women and adolescents in difficult situations; with survivors of domestic violence, sexual abuse and incest; and with physically and mentally challenged individuals. She is a senior fellow of KK Birla Foundation, WISCOMP Scholar and Rotary Global Peace Fellow and also a recipient of the Karmaveer Gold Chakra and Karmaveer Puraskaar for social change.

PART 4 AVisual Story