Project Proposal

For a Portuguese artist to create a meaningful art piece to be exhibited in Goa, she/he has to face a particular set of challenges and paradoxes. Portugal had a long connection with Goa.  This is an affirmation that we can accept.  I use the past tense here, not only because the connection does not materialize in a stable presence today, but also because the use of the present tense would result in a unilateral imposition.

The present connection exists in the culture and affections of Goans much in the same way as it might be present in their DNA.  It is no longer an imposition; it no longer stems from Portugal.  As time passes, this connection will become less and less based on decisions that individuals make in consciousness.  As for hearts to beat and irises to adjust to light, there is hardly a thought involved.  Like a ghost, this connection will remain, without making itself present.

In parallel, my inclination to exhibit in Goa, as at least in part the invitation to submit a proposal, derives from this broad, and yet dissolving connection.  The challenge becomes how to impersonate the overbearing ghost, which few want to remember, but is still, somehow, part of the family. How can one speak to Goans and about Goa transcending the vision of the old foe and its haunting past?

Goans

“The people is numerous but the greatest parts are slave, a black and lewd, going naked for the most part, or else very ill clad, seeming to me rather a disparagement than an ornament to the City”.

Pietro della Valle 1623

“ The women are very luxurious and unchaste, for there are verie few among them although they be married but they have besides their husband one or two of those that are called soldiers, with whom they take their pleasures.”

Jan Huygen van Linschoten, 1583-88

 

Since the early ages of colonization, descriptions of foreign lands and the people who inhabit them were the staple of travel literature.

From Duarte Barbosa (1500-1517), Ralph Fitch (1583), Jan Huygen van Linschoten (1583-88), Francesco Carletti (1600-1601), and François de Laval (1608), accounts and depictions of the people and customs of Goa can be understood as an early representation of Otherness.  In many of such constructions of alterity, the locals, the Portuguese and the people of mixed race are mangled through the same lens of bias and difference.  The prejudices and judgments of the writers have a more substantial presence in these constructions than the reality of the people they target and aim to portray.

As counterpoint to all these accounts by foreigners, Goan fiction of the twentieth century has built a literary image of the people and life in Goa. The project is one of self-representation, but in many of its instances the colonial debate lingers, and the awareness of diverse strata of Otherness is ever present.  Central to this compilation that embodies a Goan collective self-portrait, are the themes of Colonialism, Love Family and Gender, Hindu-Catholic relations, Class and Diaspora.

This project consists of a series of portraits based on the rich tradition of short-story and novel stemming from Goa; Goans writing in Konkani, Marathi and Portuguese such as Monohar Sardessai, Mena Kakodkar, Chandrakant Keni, Pundalik Naik, Damodar Mauzo, Naresh Kavadi, Armando Menezes, Vimala Devi and Nisha da Cunha.

Fully aware of the fictional nature of my attempts; I hope to explore the limits of representation of self and other in a series of graphite portraits. Each drawing will represent one or more characters from a story and will be titled after a short sentence extracted from the text.