The fault in the Sassoon Docks Art Festival

 

Poster for the Mumbai Urban Art Festival 2022-23 by St+art Foundation retrieved from paytminsider.com

Recently I had the fortune to visit the Mumbai Urban Art Festival 2022-23. This was the second year of the festival being hosted in Sassoon Docks, Mumbai. Sassoon Docks is a fishing port for the koli fishing community, which also includes a bustling fish market, fish related industries and car garages on the site. The art festival is beautifully integrated in the negative spaces of the site, existing in the voids of the daily.

The art installations took visual-based forms, where the clear bias for Instagram bloggers was apparent. The installations retained their social message along with their visual flair. The festival in its nature is open-to-all. However, what was common to see an overarching majority of teen to young adult audience who were extremely eager to take a photograph for their social media platforms and covering as much ground as possible in the shortest amount of time. There were little sprinklings of other age groups, who looked like they felt out of place among the young crowd.

However, the peculiar thing to notice was the fact that although the art installations sits perfectly amongst the site of fisher folk, vendors and workers. They do not interact with the art festival. No fisherman/ woman was seen entering any of the venues or queueing up to try to see what’s happening in there. As an outsider if one decides to talk to them, they are insistent to ask you to go and visit the installations and if asked if they know what is exactly inside, had no idea about it.

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An aerial shot of Sassoon Dock, 2007, retrieved from wikipedia.com by A.N. Appaiah 

The Sassoon Dock was built in 1875, by Albert Abdullah David Sassoon who owned the David Sassoon & Co. (hence the name). The dock was built to establish cotton trade for the company. Later the Port Authority of Bombay bought out the docks, and the reigns were handed over to the fishermen folk of Mumbai, the kolis. The koli folk were the settlers of Mumbai long before the British came into the picture and traditionally lived by fishing and other coast dependent livelihoods. After the British rule stepped in and eventually transformed Mumbai into one unified island and city; this resulted in the koli community being sidelined. Loss of their occupation & land lead to them being displaced. An attitude of pushing them aside still exists, long after the British left. 

The Sassoon Dock is the only publically accessible dock in Mumbai. The site supports the daily fishing requirements of the koli fisher folk, docking of their boats, fish market & various fish related industries. The site is also blessed with industrial spaces that would serve as cotton mills in the late 1800s but are now either empty or house these small industries. 

Although, now with a port to practice their fishing, the koli's problems are still not over. With issues of rising demand for food supply coupled with lack of fishes due to overfishing & climate change and no other alternate occupations in non-fishing seasons, the koli find themselves still being pushed around in a city that no longer feels as their own. The people who work in the dock, either are homeless and sleep onsite without any roof over their head or travel far distances to support their livelihood. With an high illiteracy rate amongst the fisher folk, finding alternate means of income seem impossible. 

Speaking to the people there, it was common to hear that the fisher folk do not want to see their children working as fisher folk in future and were trying their hardest to move them to labouring as construction workers or taking loans to educate them. 

Couple the koli people with the highbrow community that comes to the art fair, both do not gel with each other. The only place where they do interact is when the bloggers ask the fisher folk if they can photograph them or are seen smoking a cigarette or drinking tea from the same vendor.

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What causes this disparity? Apart from the social heirarchy stigma that is already in place. Is there a something that the art fair accentuates this divide even further? 

One thing that is overlooked is the registration end for the event. To register, you need to have a smartphone and log onto the Paytm insider website to fill up the registration fields to get a pass. For an average art fair visitor those terms make sense and are accessible very easily. However, this eliminates the access for the Sassoon Dock residents from the art fair. Disregarding if they even own a smartphone, the steps to register themselves feels like a stretch for them. An overarching use of English around the fair also is a deterrent for a community of people who are not well versed with the language. 

Yet through all this, the people of koli continue their work, from the buildings that host the installations, when you look out you see the people unbothered with what you’re doing inside the fair. The activities of fishing, cleaning, porting, transporting goods, repairing cars, cooking food, people playing cards or sleeping all continues unbothered. The koli people rest easy knowing this group of people in the Docks are so disconnected from them that their presence doesn’t bother them. 

Which is a shame because a majority of the art encased inside the fair draws inspiration from the world the kolis have made for themselves. From their daily life, the objects they interact with, their mythological beliefs and the language they speak. So much is inspired from the people and how lucky it is to display the art, where the inspiration directly stems from. However, no effort seems to be taken place for bringing the koli fisher folk in the buildings. As an outsider, you automatically enter a social class above the residents & users of the docks who seem to understand and value the koli culture & its derivatives more than them. For the users on site the art festival is nothing different from a wedding that they are not invited to. 

Ironically, the facade of the buildings in the dock are painted with motifs of the fisher folk of the docks. From their portraits to the colours that form a part of their culture, their daily activities or the abstraction of their livelihood (i.e. fishing). All this is supposed to make the Koli fisher folk become one with the festival and for them to feel included, which is celebration of them being a part of the city that usually never considers them as equal contributing members. 

The art fair looks to cater the output of this only to a class of people who do not value the source & story behind the art. The vast majority of the visitors do not take the time to read through the concept of each work, but move quickly to photograph themselves or the art to share on their social media. This isn’t wrong, but to be expected as the artists have put in considerable amount of time in developing their work to be as visually appealing and engaging for anyone whether they understand the story behind it or not. With sprinklings of other artists, art critics or appreciators do attend and talk about the festival. They are a minority compared to the blogger community.

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Thus, what should be done to involve the koli fisher folk into the festival? It is quite possible that st+art is already doing a lot to involve the people into their art fair, something I couldn’t judge by visiting the festival for a short interval of time. However, I feel that involving the fisherfolk into the process and output of the festival will only do good for the initiative.

Special guided tours for the fisher folk, where the members of st+art & the commissioned artists talk and appreciate the koli culture directly to the people who have inspired the work would be something that will not be alienating the community when the fair opens. I was glad to hear that there were discussion panels held with concerned people who want to talk about the city, the people and in turn the fisher folk also. An involvement of an active member of the community or even invite the koli people to attend these discussions or to discuss with the concerned panel of experts in their language should also help. 

Although I am not an insider and someone who knows very little of the entire initiative by st+art and the other people involved with this event. I feel that the event in its current form is outstanding in making art publically accessible. I was able to see people of all ages interact with the art and try to initiate a conversation of what is being addressed here. The scale of improvement from the last iteration is clearly seen and I hope to see it extend to wider bounds and speak about injustices in the city that go unnoticed.