Bella ciao
is not a simple succession of notes nor an orderly concatenation of verses.
Bella ciao
is a hymn capable of flying between geographies and languages, a song equipped to pass through barbed wire intact, a flame suitable to light the fuse of revolutions.
Shilpa Gupta (Bombay, 1976) knows that there are words that are poetry and that poetry is a weapon of defense.
Therefore, there are always those who want to silence them.
The Indian artist, who is exhibiting for the first time in Spain, at the Botín Center in Santander, has been working for years around the volatile idea of freedom (of movement, expression, choice...) through works of art materialized in multiple formats, but often somehow ethereal, light, lyrical;
conceived in this way because of their ability, metaphorical and literal, to cross borders and overcome the obstacles of bureaucracies.
Her pieces are made of threads, drawings, objects, videos, poems and, also, music full of protests and longings.
Image of the work 'Listening Air', part of the exhibition 'I also live under your sky'.
BELÉN DE BENITO (BOTIN CENTER)
In
I also live under your sky
, the artist's exhibition in Cantabria (opened this Saturday), the central work is made up of a sound installation titled
Listening Air,
where, under a dim light and in a secluded space, with limited capacity, the Through microphones suspended on rails hanging from the ceiling, the public listens to the melody of
Bella Ciao
and seven other songs in multiple languages that, like that one, have transcended their places of origin to become global psalms.
“Since 2017-2018 the [Indian] Government promoted laws that segregate people based on their religion, something that in India is unconstitutional, because we choose to be a secular country, so people took to the streets to protest and From there came songs like
Hum Dekhenge
[sung in Hindi and Urdu], which is the main piece of this work,” explains the artist in the glass-enclosed cafeteria of the Botín Center, overlooking the liquid landscape of the bay of Santander.
“There is a feeling of loneliness in this installation, because right now it is difficult for all of us to believe in something, we feel lost, but the strength of the voice is there, along with the loneliness of the body.”
Gupta asked 100 people from the Basque Country and Catalonia to draw the map of Spain from memory
Around this immersive work, works from around the last decade are displayed in the exhibition, supported by two large conceptual pillars.
On the one hand, those that refer to the word and the voice;
on the other, those who explore the notion of border, understood not only as a physical barrier, but also as an emotional one.
“My oldest works focus on the ideas of mobility and geography,” the artist illustrates.
She refers to pieces such as
Stars on Flags of the World
, where the stars of the many flags that use this motif appear embroidered on a cloth;
o
A0-A5
, a series of six paintings on canvas with the measurements of standard printing formats and a stripe sewn in the middle that represents, to scale, the length of the border of the city of Phulia, on the disputed border between India and Bangladesh.
In
100 Hand Drawn Maps of Spain,
from 2024, the artist asked a hundred people from the Basque Country and Catalonia (the choice of places is not accidental) to draw the map of Spain from memory, with mixed results.
“After the formation of nation-states, the situation in South Asia is very fragile, on the verge of tension,” says Gupta, “and I understand that there are also tightnesses in Spain.”
'100 Drawn Maps of Spain' work included in the exhibition 'I also live under your sky'. BELÉN DE BENITO (CENTRO BOTÍN)
Before making a stop in his day to have a coffee and chat about his ascending career, Gupta was leading a workshop with fifteen international participants related to the world of culture that, over the course of a week before the inauguration of the exhibition, they have experimented with some of the themes and methodologies that run through their work.
After half an hour of meditation, the group worked this hot morning with the texts of the book
For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit
, which emerged from an installation of the same name related to the Santander's sound proposal, which the artist exhibited at the 2019 Venice Biennale and in which fragments of poems by authors from around the world imprisoned, detained or executed for the mere fact of expressing themselves were heard.
“A part of my practice is working with artistic activities based on human contact,” says Gupta.
“Whenever possible I carry out these workshops and actions: I have done them in galleries in Bombay, in schools in Delhi and Bangalore or in France, where I developed a year-long project with children and adolescents,” details the artist.
Gupta was born and raised in huge Bombay, where he still resides.
“There I went to the art school between 1992 and 1997, which was closed practically the entire first year due to the riots that broke out after the demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque [in the State of Uttar Pradesh] by the Hindu right. which led to riots throughout the country,” he recalls.
That event, which would have future replicas such as “the Gujarat genocide” of 2002 [an episode of violence against the Muslim population in which more than 1,000 people died], opened his eyes about his city — “which he imagined himself itself as a cosmopolitan city, a dream that then began to break”—and was a turning point that would mark his professional career.
Hence his determination to maintain his studio in his heterogeneous hometown full "of migrants, where you hear countless languages in the streets", overcoming the weakness of the Indian artistic fabric and, above all, despite the obstacles of the authorities, who They often mean that their projects take much longer than necessary to develop.
“There is always a certain hesitation and a certain anxiety, that's why you have to find a way to speak,” the artist acknowledges.
“Whenever there is tension in the air, you have to find a way to negotiate it.”
'I also live under your sky.'
Shilpa Gupta.
Botín Center, Santander.
Until 8 September.
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