Author Alex Berry

In many ways, art and research are both cyclic processes that are continually informed by experiences with Place. As I experience Goan village life as a foreigner, I reverberate with pieces of the scenes I encounter – and become affected by their happenings. This post describes such a scene, and has found its way into my art projects with students at the school I am researching with. Using a “junk cycle” as their canvas and leftover house paint as their medium, the students re-imagined the ways in which they engage with waste. 

Riding on my bike, I explore the depths of Siolim

Excited, curious and hopeful as the wind in my hair

Humble, Goan villages –

Family homes of tin sheets, dirtied blue tarps, dried leaves of coconut trees

Barely held together by fishing ropes

Their floor is the earth – shared with dancing kittens and jungle bugs

The women have hair that is tightly kept, and eyes that are fierce with knowledge

– of the happenings of this place, of their duties to hold it together

they watch me carefully as I pass by, hanging laundry with firm arms of soldiers

Clothes dry with the salty air that breathes with the Arabian Sea

Bouncing about, children carry young siblings  

Cradled on bony hips, babies are naively thrusted into adventure 

Youthful boys pull two wheeled wagons stacked with heavy bags of rice

Wooden frames creaking in age, hoisted into movement by tired metal wheels

Comings and goings of local men

– dark faces dusted with sand, yellow teeth and blackened collars

Fishing poles in hand – long sticks with wire and squirming bait

Carried by bicycles from some ancient era

Rolling out of a time capsule

– rusted brown with an ear-piercing screech that announces their presence

Quickly moving, chickens squawk and scramble out of their way   

Life is bustling and the sun is high with the energy of a mid-Indian afternoon

As if strategically placed in the middle of this lively performance is a dusty, white dog  

The mismatched focal point of this scene

– skeletal

Sitting with the hunch of a hundred year old veteran

Staring at the ground, blankly as its bony carcass sways  

– slowly as the saliva that spills from its mouth

It moves as if it is underwater

drowning in a small pool at the center of a busy circus ring

– held up only by some gravitational miracle

Watching this animal suffer is what Death looks like, in its most unforgiving form

a body so vacant that even the flies acknowledge its time is up

but it sways on, holding a fragile place in the theatricals of this village

Temporal

And seemingly unnoticed

The starkness of this encounter – the parallels of life and death – slap me in the face

squeezing the blood out of my stomach with the sensuous hands of a curious child

I look away

And drive on

What else is there to do?
जीवन  चक्र

It is the day before the start of the school year. Hovered around an empty table with a group of young girls in their shelter home, I listen to them sing Hindi and American songs. Their voices are gentle, lulling with the heat of the afternoon. Their vibrations humm in heavy air, so thick with humidity it could be sliced. The girls play with a gold, beaded necklace, reminiscence of their new year festivities. Brushing the surface of the table with it’s rolling beads, they form an array shapes – a heart, an elephant, a pair of lips. Not one child working in isolation; they are not “taking turns.” The girls move together, many hands working simultaneously. A web of limbs weaving over and under, sliding around and through. This sequence is intuitive, familiar. Below the cluster of intermingling bodies, golden forms emerge. Admired for a short moment, they are lost again – on to the next. Busy and quickly moving as they sing, their bodies dance with the beads. Reverberating, sensational and eternally familial, here the individual does not exist.

I trail around the neighbourhood jungle, a basin of Goa’s flora, fauna and local squander – looking for materials the school children can explore with in this afternoon’s art project. Sharing the cool morning with my usual company – a family of indigenous pigs and ragged street dogs – We scour the land for treasures. In amongst blankets of garbage, there are pieces of tile, stone, shells, wire – tiny pebbles dusted with sand – small capsules of matter from places other than here. In some aeonian journey, they have made their way to this place. As we gather them, they move on to the next. Some to be digested, spat out, or crushed. Others to be glued, painted and admired. Enmeshed in beds of waste and sunken electrical wires, mango trees thrive high above us. Rooted with reaching barked tentacles, their greenery offers us shade from the waking sun, heavy and damp with morning dew. Lining the eastern edge of the jungle is a quiet dirt road leading to winding rows of humble shanti-homes. Built with brightly painted concrete and shabby tin roovs, their warm character is a testament of the people who live here. Through open doors and shaded windows, neighbours rise, peering out at this peculiar morning scene – curious about the girl who scours through waste with feral scavengers.