Session 19 summary
Storytelling through Textiles
Medha begins with the quotations from “Philosophies of Art and Beauty” which talks about how even the unprivileged or poorest lives have aesthetics in them. She cites a thought-provoking example of a young girl in a construction site. The young girl makes a small house using stones and bricks while her parents are busy making a real house nearby. This shows a sense of construction at a very young age without even understanding design in strict sense. Medha embarked on her journey of design after graduating from Kutch’s Mahila Vikas Sangathan in 1999. This encounter had helped her understand the importance of the environment in the lives of traditional communities. She began by observing the Rajput communities wherein their exotic textiles had fascinated her, so much so that she wished to buy the textile which she later realized that each pattern was different from the other and were made of old clothes. Although these communities were unaware of the words “upcycling” or “recycling” they practiced it religiously. Each house in arid land of Kutch had a tree applique wall hanging. Each of these hangings were made by women while singing folk songs. This had a deep impact on her and sowed the seeds of ‘sustainability’ in her. As a fresh graduate she wanted to work with rural communities and she started working with an organisation called ‘Thanal’ in Kerala. It was set up in a small village named Kovalam. This village was selected by the organisation due to issues like waste of beaches being washed into sea and for its potential for tourism. The objective was to boost the local economy by converting local resources (zero wastage) and use the resources that could be reused. Six women who were the local tailors were selected for the task and started the “Women Lives Initiatives” which began with producing small products. Medha saw potential in these women beyond simple stitching. It was the ‘God’s own Country’s air which made her to expect these women to imbibe the expressions of their surroundings in cloth. It also acted as a way of asserting their identities as they came from underprivileged backgrounds. The magic with discarded clothes had begun. Gradually many endemic trees of Kerala were illustrated in the cloth. The women were proud of their accomplishment. Under Medhas’s guidance they had illustrated thirty trees. For these women of Kerala, “the leaf was green, green and green” unlike the women in Kutch where they illustrated leafs in all colours be it pink or red or green. This was nothing but a realistic expression of their environment. These women working under Thanal were now earning ten to fifteen times more with the art which was unique and hard to replicate. They started calling themselves “Vismaya Patchwork Group”.
Apart from art being inspired from the environment, it is also about personal life. Medha also worked in other projects of Zero Waste Kovalam Organisation. It helped her to explore how one deals with issues of the environment. At that point of time, it was only the environmentalists who were engaged in such matters. Designers were yet to enter these fields. Medha as a designer was trying to fit herself in the role of an environmentalist. She wanted to know how the life of women was being affected by the environmental issues. She decided to allocate meanings to every discarded thing in a larger scheme of things than being dumped in a landfill. She pondered on how every scrap of fabric brings a new life, idea or story. The Thanal Kumbalangi Conference held in 2005 was the first rice campaign on organic rice farming. Farmers from across the country were going to attend the event. Medha and her team proposed to prepare a backdrop for the conference. The poster was titled “Save Our Rice”. One-half of the poster depicted the green fields and forest cover. The dam in the middle had blocked the water on the other side. The other side of the dam had roads, no fishes in water, pesticides in the fields, tubewell taps but no water flowing from it. Through this illustration many understood the difference between organic and industrial farming. At the same time it brought a lot of meaning to the women who illustrated them as they felt their capacities to depict a relevant topic. They went on to create another poster that resonated with their lives. It was a poster sponsored by Tourism Watch, an organisation from Germany. The poster was about the tourism in Kovalam, issues of growing prostitution due to loss of livelihoods and plastic ruining the landscape. The poster was an expression of environmental issues as it showed how the traditional occupations of people are completely lost and occupations have changed to a great extent. People have been compelled to cut stones under MGNREGA.
Due to the increasing number of cancer patients in their village, the village people decided to shift to organic farming. The gates of the houses in this village are never closed. They have a little garden in each house where vegetable cultivation is done. Any two houses together have cultivation of vegetables on their roofs. Youth of the village are responsible for switching to cleaner sources of energy like solar panels and bio-gas. Youth are also involved in collecting plastic syringe bottles from nearby hospitals for drip farming. Overall, the men are engaged in economic issues, women are involved in organic farming and youth in transformation to cleaner sources of energy. Further, each of the houses in the village also has paintings of sustainable living. They also have a small shop where they sell veggies. They use crop rotation in farming. Thus, this village exhibits a democratic design where everyone is working towards a common goal. Most women have remained under-represented in agriculture even after they do all the work. They are not acknowledged for the work they do. They are devoid of ownership rights over land. Bio Basics is a small enterprise about highlighting the role of women in farming and their marginalisation and how they can be included. They have also been to COP climate conventions and highlighted the gender issues in farming. A bunch of aware citizens of Trivandrum had been walking to the trees in the city to appreciate their presence and brought together botanical information much like a citizen science endeavour. This group was holding a campaign to oppose the Municipal Corporation’s move to cut a hundred year old tree. Medha rose to the occasion and quickly made small tree badges of scrap of clothes for the group and reached the venue. The people were surprised and happy as the badges acted as a symbol of solidarity and pride for the tree lovers. It brought meaning to their endeavour. She later also made more badges for the group for another campaign. This had firmed Medha’s belief in the strength of the community and supporting each other through a medium. Medha realised that it is human nature that we wake up to the problems when it affects us directly.
In the larger scheme of things the changing point came in 2011 when she started the ‘First Forest’. The waste from Trivandrum was being dumped in a nearby village Villapilsala. This dumping had contaminated the underground water causing many diseases and health issues in the village. The village panchayat had continuously protested against this in Trivandrum and the village administration had refused to accept the garbage trucks from the city. Due to the protest the Municipal Corporation had to close the landfill in the village from December 2011. No waste was collected from Trivandrum starting that day. This led to the burning of wastes by independent houses and dumping of wastes at night. The flat population took to segregating their wastes into biodegradable and non-biodegradable. This brought in a lot of awareness about plastic waste. People started finding ways to redefine some wastes that could not be discarded. This is when Bhatt started to explore the idea of creating art out of discards. Medha designed strategies for developing functional products. The strategy focused on a number of factors. Starting with streamlining the process of collecting discards, she gradually established one-to-one relationships with discarders, garbage collectors, artisan groups and consumers. Cared to engage in door to door collection mechanisms. Segregation of discards was done based on quality as well as on quantity. Addressing issues of hygiene and storage of discards became crucial. Prepared to let the discards dictate the product design. Normalise design for all economic strata of society. Supporting people’s movements and campaigns through the products. Some of the things Medha started working with due to her growing interest in environmental issues was ‘birds’. Through her environmentalist friends she learnt about the alarming rate at which the number of birds was decreasing. She pondered about how she could make her consumers aware about these issues while also showing the beauty of Nature. The ‘wings’ of the bird turned out to be an important element which would be attractive and also create awareness. The wings could also be easily moulded into different colours with the scrap of clothes. She created yellow palash trees and bougainvillea on old sarees to express beauty around through a very simple technique. Ecosystem has been a crucial character in Medha’s work as it embodies the idea of interconnectivity in everything. She tells stories by a single motif of an ecosystem. Ecological roles of insects with beadwork creates a unique pattern of telling the importance of insects in an ecosystem. Through this she tries to help her consumer appreciate Nature in a more profound manner. Medha has mapped the shoreline of Kerala in the last three to four years to understand the changes happening due to climate change. She noted the changes in landscape, sea erosion, loss of estuaries and the problem of sand with the construction of seawalls in the beaches which has been interfering with the mechanism of sand and water movement at the shores. Climate change has disrupted the dynamics of Nature. The fishermen now have to go deeper into the sea to make a catch. Witnessing all this has enriched her vision to make her work highlight the issues related with the environment among her customers. Her creations with this vision include the depiction of “Five Ferns” of the Himalayas, and “Lily Pond” where apart from lilies there are also dragonflies, birds etc that together inhabit that make the pond ecosystem. “Six Trees Six Cities” depicted the six trees in the six cities where a couple celebrating their fifty year anniversary had spent their lives together. Each scrap has given life to Medha’s story. Fabric emerges as a “surprise” for her as well as her clients. Further, Medha highlighted the challenges she encountered in her endeavour under “First Forest”. All discards were never used, people were hard to convince about the value of labour that went into creating products out of waste, people were convinced about their ‘greatness’ on providing all their waste clothes and again going on with their ways of consumerism. Medha cited the concept of ‘Wendigo Economics’ which talks about Wendigo, an evil spirit originating in the folklore of First Nations (Canadian Indigenous People). The Wendigo thrives on scarcity creating unmet desires, needs emptiness. These unmet desires are fulfilled by consumerism in today’s time which creates a big gap between consumers and producers. It has fabricated demand and compulsive over consumption. This nurtures and strengthens capitalism. Capitalism has fuelled the idea of prosperity where it is all about commodities that are new. It has ignored or purposely denied the idea of upcycling or recycling to further its interests. Still the people who have accompanied Medha in her work now understand the challenges that she faces in upcycling. Medha is grateful that people have started understanding even if it is at a smaller scale and believes more people will understand it with time. She believes the solution to this is “gratitude” towards Nature with a feeling of no control over it and a spirit of interdependence. Her depictions of birds, trees, ecosystem etc. reinforces her belief in being a part of the larger world. First Forest has faced many challenges since 2013. There is a competition with machine made products. The machine-made products have posed the problem of competitive pricing. Mobilising and motivating a team is also tough. Lastly, people believe in the myth that there’s always somebody out there to recycle, which obviously is not true and further fuels the problem of waste.
Medha started the “Bug Club of the Forest Floor” in Trivandrum in 2014 where she met with children every Saturday and discussed aspects of Nature. The club had a library where there were many books and documentaries on Nature. The club started attracting more members with growing popularity. The children of the club had become so aware so as to protest the burning of waste in the children’s park. Those children have now grown, graduated and some are even working in the field of ecology as professionals. Medha inspired a campaign called “Trash Your Trash” with Film and Video Students at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad in 2018. The students working with her tried to find ways in which the design community can become more sustainable. They started a campaign about creating awareness about the waste generated by the designers. They motivated everyone from students and faculties to cooks to cut down on wastes. The campaign helped in reducing waste by forty percent. Thus the youth was inspired to counter environmental issues at their level and also tackle “climate anxiety”. Medha has been involved in a self-funded research of beadwork of Kathiawadi community. Her area of interest is how mathematics played an important role in the propagation of an art where women were illiterate. Since multiples of three beads were used to create beadwork, Medha finds this research necessary to preserve as well as to propagate the art. Medha worked as a Research Consultant for reviving the traditional Bead Jewellery of Rathwa Community of Chota Udaipur at Bhasha Research and Publication Centre, Tejgarh. She is trying to make it a part of the school curriculum so as to revive it among the community. Medha concluded the session with the thought: “Expressing gratitude is a revolutionary idea!”
About the Speaker
Medha Bhatt
Textile Designer and Artist
Founder, First Forest
Medha Bhatt is a textile designer by training, artist and advocate of zero waste, craft researcher and maths tutor by passion. She is an alumna of National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Medha is the founder of design studio “First Forest” that creates up-cycled art and craft products from household and tailor discards and develops innovative green solutions towards zero waste. Her interests range from expressing socio-ecological issues through art to initiating “The Bug Club” for children to create awareness about natural history and environment. Medha had been part of Pattanam Archaeological Excavations in 2012. A recipient of the INTACH-UK Project Grant in 2013, she has presented her ethnographic research on trade beads and bead-work of Gujarat at the British Museum, London in 2012; the Textile Society of America Symposium in Savannah, Georgia in 2016 and Vancouver, Canada in 2018.
