Rahul Inamdar did spend two days standing on a desk, painting an entire museum wall, as did several other artists, who took over every inch of the building and converted it into a live art tableau. Meera Devidayal really did spend two weeks making her site-specific video, which played in its own room at the entrance, in conversation with the other videos located throughout the museum. Now as I look back, I wonder was it a dream? All the tweets, posts, photographs and subsequent conversations seem to suggest that the Museum of Memories really did happen. Shadow and truth of appearances and disappearances across distances, symmetry, forgetfulness, incarnations into other beings: A map, a landscape, a sea, that doesn't still. The sharpened tip of a thorn, always precise, marking contours, lines, limits. Note for a Memory in a Museum - a poem by Aditi Singh
Two weeks of planning, and then the appointed day came and whizzed by, in a blur. I bounced the idea off some of our Godrej India Culture Lab friends, they loved it, and before you could say Viva Vikhroli, our Museum was being built, collaboratively between the Lab and other city based organizations like Junoon Theatre, the Visual Disobedience artists collective and the Brown Paper Bag blog. I wondered if it might it be possible to create a museum based on the collaborative spirit of Mumbai, placing objects in it, and also bringing it alive by mixing these up with artists, photographers, performers, scientists and historians. Must museums only store old objects and catalogue the past? What if the Museum of Memories could store new objects, and catalogue the present? Orhan Pahmuk curated a Museum of Innocence based on his book in Istanbul. I was also interested in playing with the idea of what museums do. As darkness set in, bye-bye, tata, khattam-shud…the end. A museum that opened in the morning and shut in the evening, a museum that was build and destroyed within the cycle of one day. I’d heard of many pop up shops, but I hadn’t heard of a pop up museum and so wondered what it would be to create one. The idea of a pop is now catching on in India – as in the rest of the world. This is how the Museum of Memories idea began. The warehouse shell or body would then go, but at least the memories or its spirit would remain. Then I had a fanciful idea – perhaps we could listen to the warehouse’s silent plea and organize a grand farewell to it on the day before its demolition? An event at the warehouse that would bring life to it, and fill it with a new set of memories just before it died. When I learnt that it was going to be demolished, I was incredibly saddened at first. What seemed like an ugly godown tostore agricultural feed from the outside, called out to me, telling me: look at me properly, see the beauty in my broken glass panes, my high ceiling dripping with shards of metal, my gnarled trees, my pocked walls, my soaring pillars. Appearances often conceal the true nature of things.
When I first stumbled across the warehouse in early November, I felt a strange connect. This was a one-day only event with live art, videos, dance, music, theater, fashion, technology, alternate reality games and more, all located within a 60,000 square feet empty Godrej warehouse that was scheduled to berazed the very next day. In this blog post, I want to revisit our Museum of Memories that we organized in December 2012.
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