DOMESTICITIES23 – 26 NOVEMBER 2017 | SALIGAO GOA

ABOUTGOAPHOTO

GoaPhoto is an international photography festival that produces location-specifi c installations connecting photographic displays and their architectural contexts.

Its second edition will be held from 23 to 26 November 2017 in the village of Saligao, some 20 km north of Panaji (Goa’s capital), which boasts many remarkable examples of Goan heritage architecture. Because many of these homes continue to be lived in and used as residences, the project will propose an innovative approach to working with

"living heritage".

We have requested fi ve curators to explore the theme of “the domestic” and to respond to the location their exhibitions will inhabit, as the private spaces that constitute our venues will retain their in situ furniture: it will be a case of two aesthetics -the photographic and the domestic- engaging with each other.

What kind of exhibition can populate a snake box in the house of a set designer? Can the two-seater palanquin that receives visitors in one of the residencies be used as a frame for a Mexican photo essay? Can we

highlight the cosiness of a visiting room by displaying an exhibition on cushions? Is exhibiting in a kitchen going too far? Are we serious? These are some of the questions that pop-up when one attempts to test site-specifi city inside domestic spaces, assigning a central stage to the objects that inhabit them, and, in the process, attributing to them almost animistic qualities.

It is irrelevant whether the visitor is confronted with an exquisitely refi ned craft (china from Macao, intricate pieces of furniture made out of African wood, hand painted Portuguese tiles) or a plastic trinket picked on a trip as, for us, in the words of the much-admired Teju Cole, these domestic objects “are reservoirs of specifi c personal experience, fi lled with the hours of some person’s life. They have been touched, or worn through use”. Taking fi ne art photography out of the gallery is another instance of our penchant for all things middlebrow.

Bring your walking shoes, and we will take you on a photographic tour that seamlessly mixes local and global in the village of Saligao, which is rich in charm and history.

TRAVELLINGLIBRARY/BINDbox

The Travelling Library is an ephemeral library of photobooks selected for their relevance to the festival’s theme:

‘domesticities’. Curated by BIND, this exhibition showcases an eclectic mix of publications from different places and eras, with an installation acknowledging

the physicality of the 'book-objects' as much as the spirit of the house they will temporarily inhabit. Come to Heidi’s place, where photobooks are at home.

¡ BINDCOLLECTIVE.IN

CURATORSEDER CHIODETTO, CRISTINA DE MIDDEL, AKSHAY MAHAJAN, LOLA MAC DOUGALL, JESÚS MICÓ

PROGRAMME OFEVENTS

5:00 – 7:15 pm Walking tour with visiting curators | Starting point: The House of Enquiry. House 5/92 Don Vaddo (around the corner from Lourdes Convent)

7:00 – 8:00 pm | SALIGAO INSTITUTESnail on the SlopeProjection by Anshika Varma

10:00 am – 12:30 pm | HOUSE VENUES3:30 – 6:00 pm

8:00 – 8:45 pm | SALIGAO INSTITUTEFloat HomePerformance for Camera by Shivani GuptaMusic: Sandip Srivastava

9:00 pm onwards | SALIGAO INSTITUTECLOSING PARTY

7:30 pm | SALIGAO STORIESOPENING PARTY (by invitation only)

THE RED & OCHRECORNER HOUSE

At a verdant corner of intersecting labyrinthine lanes in D’Mello Vaddo sits a Red and Ochre house. The home of Alice and Shrinivas hosts an exhibition that is an ode to the vanishing era of the family album. In an age when the family album has been replaced by the digital, three artists provide a thought-provoking meditation on the nature of obsolescence and memory: weaving visual narratives that attest to the once-universal appeal of documenting and displaying the mundane; works that repurpose and reinterpret their own repositories of family history and memory. Sukanya Ghosh works within the sanctuary of family history that family albums most often present, in which the photographs are "reshaped" through the use of memorabilia, popular imagery and moving images. The resultant works employ memory and history to create imagined narratives in mythopoetic spaces. Cecilia Verilli and Federico Carpani’s work “1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002” is not really an exhibit. Rather, it is a card game masquerading as one. The authors have used their personal family photographs, and cropped them in alluring, enigmatic and unusual ways to create a match pair memory game. The idea is straightforward with 140 cards in total, comprising 70 pairs, which could be played face down turning one card up at a time and collecting pairs. Kannagi Khanna’s photographs never tire of stories as told to her by her grandfather. Intertwining contemporary images with family pictures, she plots

memories and dreams in small town India.

TEXT BY AKSHAY MAHAJAN

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QUINTASERENA

Built in 1835, Quinta Serena houses unique objects, including a double-seater palanquin, woods of African provenance, old gin-bottles and family portraits of the de Souzas. The work by Mexican photographer Claudia López Ortega welcomes the visitor in the frescoed hall. “El Paraíso” is an impoverished beach resort regularly affected by seasonal storms that destroy the local dreams of tourism development. It is against this background that the photographer observes her daughter’s growth — she compares her freckles to constellations that undergo rearrangement year after year — as well as the playful exchange of roles between the daughter and the photographer-mother. In the sumptuous Sala, you will fi nd Roberto Tondopo’s “The Little Nougat House”, where he captures scenes of rare intimacy. The protagonists here are his pre-adolescent niece and nephew who appear deeply engrossed in themselves and, in a new iteration of the Hansel and Gretel story, intent on devouring the house they inhabit. Diego Moreno’s “Guardians of Memory” is a collection of portraits of panzudos (folk monsters) in domestic settings. This follows a Catholic tradition marked by a pre-Hispanic infl uence, an event that takes place every year during the La Merced celebration in the

Mexican province of Chiapas. Dressed as unpleasant fi gures, the devotees hope to purge their sins according to a peculiar motto: the uglier you appear, the purer you will become.

An altogether different aesthetic ideal is explored by Elisa González Miralles in “Wannabe”. Hung from a wrought iron poster bed in the guest room are close-up shots of Japanese Baby dolls — latex human size dolls ordered from a catalogue — alongside portraits of Japanese women who imitate that aesthetic The women dress, make up and even undergo plastic surgery to that end. As the curator Jesús Micó points out, “this is a strange tale of the realistic dolls and the Japanese teenagers who both imitate one another”, perhaps telling the tale of the subjugation of women elsewhere.

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THE HOUSE OF THE WHITE CRABSBuilt in the nineteenth century, the house now sits on the corner of one of Saligao’s busiest roads. Around fi fteen years ago, following the partitioning of an inheritance it was divided into two independent dwellings. After climbing the entrance steps, two entrance doors lead to two very different domestic arrangements open up to visitors — a suitable setting for the two nonconformist refl ections on the question of the family space that GoaPhoto proposes:

On the left, the paintings that fill the studio of the figurative painter Francis Desousa converse with Stéphane Winter’s unique family album “The Winter”, which spans 23 years of the photographer’s life. Adopted by a Swiss middle class couple in 1975 when he was one year old, Stéphane started clicking

these playful family snapshots when he was just fi fteen. The inevitably amateur feel of the early images gives way to a deliberate amateur aesthetic in the later works. What remains constant, however, is the non-stop enjoyment the Winters seemed to find in staging photographs for their photographer-son and act as a reminder that unconventional families are happy in their own way. The other entrance door leads to Patsy’s cozy living-room, where the Spanish photographer Bego Antón’s exploration of the Musical Canine Freestyle — dancing contests of dogs and their mostly female owners in the USA — is displayed. Antón gained access to their homes and witnessed choreographies performed candidly and without any trace of irony. In the words of Jesús Micó, Antón becomes “a supertourist in other people’s extravagance” and allows us a glimpse into a subculture where Everybody Loves to Cha-cha-cha.

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ARTISANALEHOMES

For his project "This World: Mine and Yours" (2007), Alexandre Sequeira invited two adolescents living in the suburbs of the Amazonian city of Pará to photograph their settings with a hand-made camera. He then superimposed their images. The remarkable results of this dialogue, subjected to a double mediation — one proposed by the artist and the second made possible by the photographic medium — often includes the adolescents’ domestic surroundings, which

we have chosen to display in the kitchen. In "Transparencies of Home", we observe scenes from the intimate family life of the Brazilian photographer Ilana Bar. This is a universe marked by affection and by Down’s Syndrome, which affects three of the family members. In the words of the curator Eder Chiodetto, the work stands out for its ‘subtle approach, its light and the delicacy of the frames. It is a work that overfl ows with love’. Look in the cupboard where many of the images with mirrors — a subtext that also runs through the series — have been hidden. The playful self-portraits that Nino Cais presents in "The Travellers" are shot in his mother’s home, inventively using her objects as unexpected props, from everyday items to souvenirs collected — we imagine — during her numerous trips.

As the Brazilian photography critic Cauê Alves highlights, his work points to the “impossibility of separating the body (…) from the memories and emotions in relation to the surrounding objects”. By representing himself surrounded by objects that appear “extensions of his body”, Cais achieves an original portraitof his unseen mother.

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THE HOUSE OFENQUIRY

Two stone canons preside over the entrance to the home of set-designer and artist Aradhana Seth. We have chosen to use the mother-of-pearl shell windows in the entrance porch to frame

“Villa Argentina”, which is the name of the house that

Aruna Canevascini shares with her Iranian-born artist mother in Switzerland. This is a collaborative project where Canevascini recreates her mother’s poetic universe fi ltering it through her own, using her as a model sometimes and at other times arranging domestic objets trouvés for the camera. The living room — with its cathedral ceiling and filled with memorabilia from the film The Darjeeling Ltd — is the perfect setting for Rasel Chowdhury’s exploration of railway aesthetics, this time in Bangladesh. As a child, the only way to reach Rasel´s hometown was by train, a means of transportation he later substituted with the bus.

"Railway Longings" narrates the rediscovery of a forgotten route and childhood memories, as the photographer stands testament to the formation of new landscapes. Anything is possible when you offer a snake box and a sculptural spiral staircase as a bait for Kapil Das to put forward a show. Given Kapil’s background, we can be sure that it will have a certain degree of wickedness. The studio contains a work-in-progress fi lm archive, made up of “residues” of Seth’s fi lm design work from fl oor plans, moodboards to props used on the shoot making transparent the process of designing a fi lm from page to screen. In addition there is the SET RESET exhibit, a workshop held with the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology born out of an interaction with the house and what is housed in it.

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