Curator K Ramachandran will talk about what it takes to record the art history of a community that has never been documented
An art form from Peruvanam
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Around 10 km from the city of Thrissur in Kerala is Peruvanam, a small village with ancestral wisdom that dates back to over thousand years. Here, the past lives and thrives harmoniously with the present. Arts archivist and curator K Ramachandran, who is also the founder of Mumbai-based cultural organisation Keli, was born here.
Growing up, he remembers being enamoured by the village's ability to sustain as a "cultural entity". It's this fascination for the community that has now prompted Ramachandran to embark on an ambitious project to record the village's art history. The initiative has been undertaken as part of the 25th anniversary celebrations of Keli.
K Ramachandran
In an upcoming Mumbai Local event titled 'Saga of a village: An arts story', Ramachandran will use Peruvanam as an example to talk about documenting art history in a country where so much knowledge is retained in oral tales, myths and memory. "My village is a peculiar one. It's got a 1,400-year-old rhythm tradition, and an ancient Sanskrit theatre tradition, known as Koodiyattam, which is over 1,800 years old. It is also home to the world's oldest Sanskrit women's theatre tradition called (Nangiarkoothu). At the same time, it has a rich contemporary art history," says the Mumbai-based curator. Despite such a rich, surviving history, Ramachandran says there was absolutely zero documentation about this village. While speaking of his new project, the art curator will also help you collectively re-imagine what it means to build an oral archive of a community. Cultural buffs might not want to give this a miss.
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