Canned Life is a multi-media installation in miniature by New York-based artist, puppeteer and designer Chris Green exploring the unlikely connection between Delhi’s Coronation Park, the site of King George V's imperial coronation in 1911, and Kathputli Colony, a Delhi slum settled by traditional and performing artists. The installation traces the ‘natural history’ of the bioscope – the once revolutionary, century old film projection technology that has remained in vestigial form in the folk tradition of the bioscopewallahs. Canned Life is a brief experimental entre into the unique parallels between these two sites using video and photographs of the urban fabric of Delhi, reflecting the anarchic, spliced-image and peep-show style of India's Bioscopes and the original 19th century form's dedication to 'looking at life' (Greek: bios-skopeein).

Artist’s Statement:

BACKGROUND INFO In 2009, I was awarded a Creative Capital Grant for my project Ultra-Local Sublime. This project will document and interpret 5 culturally and physically shifting geographic sites around the world using photography, HD video, sound, and motion graphics. The results of this research and footage will be incorporated into an intimate performance-media installation to premiere in New York in late 2011 with subsequent tours to museums and theaters across the U.S. The installation will show how investigating small sites can reveal a great deal about our changing relationship to the natural and built environments. Areas for investigation include: Rhode River on the Chesapeake Bay, VA.; Silver Creek Park in Ft. Worth, TX; Zeer grazing grounds in the Mongolian steppe; 55 Wall Street, NYC; and Coronation Park, New Delhi. All of these sites embody the types of socio-ecological shifts that are in some way endemic to their regions, from rapid urban development in New Delhi to nutrient changes happening on a microscopic scale in VA, etc. Ultra-Local Sublime involves investigating and curating selective aspects of these sites that are gleaned from their geographic histories, social and natural ecologies, and current states of development or decay. Each site will involve partnering with host researchers and other organizations who have an existing presence the area. Confirmed partnerships to-date range from theater groups to the Smithsonian Institute.

Canned Life is simply the name given to the multimedia installation being put up at Reflection Art Gallery in Shahpur Jat, New Delhi Feb. 26 – Mar. 12, 2010. This installation will include a selection of miniature video clips, photographs, and graphic images illustrating the process and results that my research has uncovered in the time between Jan. 14 and Feb. 20.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: A ‘NARRATIVE ECOLOGY’

Fragmentary published histories, physical artifacts, mercurial memories, geological data, tourism accounts, fading signifiers, weather archives, oral histories, building codes, transient social intersections, blatant lies, public use laws, and concept designs are some of the many facets that comprise what I call a narrative ecology, a system of stories that surrounds, penetrates, informs, influences, and extends from almost every inch of a location like the tangled electrical cables bristling from so many of Delhi’s relay poles. I take it for granted that every geographic site is saturated with stories and narrative threads, from the provenance of an invasive plant species, to the circumstantial evidence of a footprint, to the potential consequences of disobeying posted signs; and so, the choice of which thread(s) to follow and investigate provides the entre for the messy artistic process. Because there is so much choice and flexibility in what threads to follow, the process is curatorial and highly subjective. At its most basic level, this kind of open-ended geographic investigation into the narrative ecology of space is a poetic method for stumbling across odd and wonderful things about our environment that are nonetheless ‘true.’

CANNED LIFE DESCRIPTION

Canned Life will feature the following thread: Coronation Park, near NH1, was the site of the 1911 Durbar in which George V was crowned Emperor of India and where it was announced (as a surprise) that India’s capital would be moved from Calcutta to Delhi. At this event was an American named Charles Urban who, with a small crew, filmed the durbar in kinemacolor, creating the first feature length color film in history. At three hours (16,000 feet of film) With Our King and Queen Through Delhi premiered at the Scala in London (along with a replica of the Taj Mahal and a 48 piece band) to profound effect on both the mass appeal of film the then nascent color film industry. George and Mary saw the film twice. Charles Urban was also the inventor of the bioscope, the breakthrough projection technology which still has vestigial remnants over a century later on the streets of India as the beloved proto-media/performance form of the bioscopewallahs. Many of North India’s surviving bioscopewallahs have today settled in Kathputli Colony near Shadipur Depot. Both Coronation Park (which was abandoned in the 1950s) and Kathputli Colony (now a 45 year old jhuggi jhonpri ) are on the punch list of the DDA for redevelopment over the next six months. Whereas the current barren expanse of Coronation Park will be revitalized as a manicured public space, Kathputli Colony will be transformed into 12 story high rises and commercial outlets. Both spaces were established under the aegis of spectacle and performance, and both are to be brought from their current improvised marginality into a more codified use.

The process for this admittedly non-academic research is like any documentary including extensive site visits, relationship-building with NGOs, residents, and government bodies associated with the sites, interviews, archival research, conversations with other media artists, and pure luck. To-date, many individuals have been very gracious to me with information and guidance for this project including Imran Ghufran and Ravi Kant at Sarai; Latika and Aastha at KHOJ Studios; Mohammed Ayaz Ahmed and M. Imran at SARTHI; Bhagwati Hatwal and Rajeev Sethi of the Asian Heritage Foundation; Rahaab Allana, Akshaya Tankha, Anita Jacob, and Pramod Kumar at the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts; Ajay Kumar at INTACH; Bhavar Lal, Santosh Bhat, Puran Bhat, and many others of the Bhule Bisre Kalakar Collective; Amit, Ruchika, and Subhashima of the Frameworks Collective, and Narayani Gupta, to name a few.

In many ways, Canned Life will be an illustration of the difficulty of trying to understand these sites beyond the usual frames of heritage, environment, and cultural significance. For this installation, the research itself will be visualized as an aesthetic of its own. It’s a mess. Things connect which shouldn’t and vice versa. Canned Life is therefore something like a framed napkin-design or an action photograph – a blurred process caught in time.