After what was supposed to be a 24 hour layover in Singapore that turned into a 45 hour layover in Singapore due to the fact that I missed my flight since I was lounging way too hard in the world’s most beautiful and entertaining airport (there are butterflies, gardens and sunflowers!), I made it from Berlin to Cambodia. After a week in Cambodia, I reached India, where I travelled across the whole country for 6 weeks before arriving to my artist residency in the small village of Andore, Rajasthan, just 3 hours outside Jodhpur, dubbed the blue city. I applied to this residency last December after weeks of searching for affordable artist residencies on farms. This residency in India, connecting artists from around the world with village people and encouraging cross cultural exchange and connection was the one for me. I had been anxiously waiting for this during all my travels: a dedicated space to simply making art. There was so much space to think, to breathe, to wonder, to dream, to be. Every day, I spent slow mornings listening to birds chirping and basking in the pink sun before it got unbearably hot. I began by writing with a morning chai, fresh buffalo’s milk yogurt, fruit and Indian porridge. We would take the jeep on an adventure, walk around the village, meet people, and we would get invited into home after home for chai and cultural sharing. In the evenings we often went to dances or music parties. Sacred nights under the stars were spent at our little farm where we slept in tents, barely protected from the outside, often intruded upon by local dogs in the middle of the night. All our neighbors slept outside on handwoven beds.
Often during the day, I would walk around and visit all of our farming neighbors, communicating minimally with hand gestures and laughs. I played with the kids. I learned how to sickle weeds, milk the buffalo, clean the dishes, cook the food and make chai by watching the women. They often laughed at how silly I was to be so interested in their work. I always praised them and told them (via translation apps) how amazing their work was to me and how impressive their skills were. These women were strong, resilient, and tougher than any woman I’d met before. There was something magical about them and I was obsessed. I’d watch them for hours. They’d teach me things and enlist me to help them sometimes, but I was always clumsy, unskilled, and unforgivably white. They would make fun of me for not knowing how to do anything. I was happy my incompetence could at least bring them great joy and laughter. With time, I got pretty good at sickling weeds. That was my favorite thing, and it was only time I really felt helpful and not a huge klutz just getting in their way. I began to interview many women, to ask them how they felt about themselves as women. What it means to be a woman in India, what their role was, how they felt about it. I would ask them about their community with other women, their spirituality, how they connected with the earth and with the goddesses. In the picture below, a skirt is hung upon the grasses. I saw skirts hanging like this on trees or bushes across all different villages in the area. I was told that when women were in a depression they would hang up their skirt to cleanse it of the bad spirit.
Many women had shockingly different answers to my questions on spirituality however, and I was surprised by the diversity in religious/spiritual beliefs all designated to “hinduism” by westerners. That such contrast co-existed in even a very small, seemingly cohesive village. Some women really spoke about the goddesses. Others were more philosophical and would proclaim the goddesses were not important and talk about a more universal energy. Other women said the Earth was the most important goddess because she provides us with everything we need to live.
I was so inspired by the work of the women. Their strength. Their confidence. Their ease in their bodies. Their knowing of self. Their sacrificial love for their families. Their ceaseless efforts to provide everything for their families. Their dignity, their laughter. Their smiles as wide as the desert, their hearts as rich as the fertile soil in their castor fields, their love as deep as the roots of the acacias, their hands as strong as the buffalo hide. Unwavering, protective, motherly love, strong and grounded, able to command and to whisper. Their hospitality was commanding yet gentle. Fiery. There was a fire and a firmness in their souls that came from living under this fiery red sun. Every evening, the sun would at last give in to gravity after a day of hard work and ceaseless shine. Becoming heavy and glowy and pink as she melted, she would surrender to the infinite golden desert horizon. As she slipped below the surface, making her final bow, she would dazzle the whole sky for just a little while, before leaving us in the dark.
Rehka, one of the few girls in the village who knew any English and who was studying at a college in Sirohi, became a close friend and translator for me throughout my adventures in Andore. She was always working hard to help her mother with housework, cooking and with the babies. She also helped her father with brick work and her grandfather with the pottery. It is her dream to help the girls of Andore receive better education. Many girls here are forced out of school at a young age to help their families on the farm, around the house and with the family craft. Few ever attend higher education. Many baby girls are never given the chance to live at all purely because of their gender. It is Rehka’s dream to be a teacher and educator and to never get married. She is a unique woman in her village, where everyone is married under traditional arranged marriages and it is most girls’ dream and duty to be a wife and mother. Rehka loves and respects the women of her village and how hard they work and how strong they are. She sees how capable women in India are and she is proud to be her mother’s daughter and siblings’ sister. All the same, she imagines traveling and seeing far off places. Most of all, she dreams of helping the women of her own village and state receive more education, choice and autonomy. Rehka and I had so much fun making this film and she enjoyed the active, creative role she had in the film. We played a lot, got silly, danced, and laughed. She enjoyed the fantasy story I wrote based off her and asked her character name be “Millie.”
I thought a lot about my role there and my interaction with the people. What was their reaction to me being there? In most cases what I experienced from local people was extreme happiness and excitement that I, as a foreigner and white person, was there. They took thousands of photos with and of me in different poses and arrangements with different family members. I spent countless hours in different homes and villages being photographed, my hair and clothes being picked and prodded at as an oddity, forced to eat more and more, and barely being able to communicate through it all outside smiles and sharing of photos from my home country and of my family (which was always asked). They only wanted to serve me as a guest in their country. I was given countless chais, smiles, meals, and in one village, even a foot washing as is custom in their culture. It was incredibly humbling and at times, disconcerting. Why was I there? Was my presence harmful? Was I meddling in an ancient culture? How could I help these people in such greater “poverty” than I? Could I help at all? Or is that my white savior complex? No one here was in desperate conditions. They always had food to eat, family to be with, and laughs to share. It was only from a western perspective to say that they were in poverty. They lived a simple yet good life. The only problem I would hear reoccuringly was the lack of options, education, health care and autonomy for women. How could I help? The issue seemed so huge across India and I felt so small. I had to look at my skills and see who I was and see what I could do as an artist.
I wanted to uplift the ambitions of the girls in the village. So I held a dream circle ceremony and asked them about their dreams. They all told me they wanted to be teachers, soldiers, police women, and educators. I was blown away by the massive desires of these little girls and I hoped that bringing them all together and that praying, singing and dancing for our dreams would generate some kind of power within them to go after what they desired if that were different than the path laid out before them. I filmed it as a scene in my film, imagining a fantasy Andore in which all the girls were supported in their deepest desires. I don’t know if my work had any impact on them or if it should, but it encapsulated a moment in time when I was there and we were interacting and something shifted in all of us, perhaps forever.