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SOME RUINS ARE EXTANT....... Transient city and rooted one, 2024
At Jan Van Eyck Académie, Netherlands  


Maastricht bears the debt of its own excavations and those who carried them out. Two thousand years ago the Romans excavated Limburg to marl the land and forge building bricks. In the thirteenth century, the region’s limestone was used to build the city’s walls and churches. By the 1920s, ENCI (Eerste Nederlandse Cement Industrie), located on Mount Saint Peter, had become the biggest cement works in Europe. As ever more ground was unearthed, so too were fossils, including the first Mosasaurus skull in 1764. Many of these are housed today in Maastricht’s Natural History Museum. Since arriving at Jan van Eyck, Arjun Das, whose work is always rooted in workingclass communities in the places in which he lives, has made a point of visiting construction sites across the city. Though ENCI’s mining practices ended in 2018, several former employees entrusted Das with original bricks from Maastricht’s historic wall as well as more recent ones being used to repair it. Employing archival techniques inspired by archaeological excavation methods, he carves new “fossils” into these recovered fragments. Titled SOME RUINS ARE EXTANT....... Transient city and rooted one, they depict instruments of the city’s unheralded workers. Across recovered limestone, found wood, and drawings, Das creates an iconography of the laboring class. The imagery contrasts with depictions of bourgeois power and comfort that frequently appear within the same works. Carving into limestone and wood, he reveals deeply stratified layers of society: mirrored worlds of rich and poor. If Das’ fossils are an attempt to fill the lacunae of the region’s historical record, his wood carvings and drawings introduce a visual vocabulary of the working class in the present.

 

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Traces

                                                                                                              TRACES
 Coming from the daily hustle and bustle of a city like Kolkata, I often take walks along the banks of the River Aare. During these daily walks, I started observing the work of road crews who were re-laying gas lines. The surfaces of the roads held a special attraction for me.The cobblestones reminded me of Kolkata’s Strand Road, where I spent many years working in restaurants. In Kolkata, the cobblestones have been retained not so much for their historical significance but to support the weight of freight trucks. In the streets of Aarau, metal markers for gas lines and decorative grates for storm drains alerted me to the designsensitivity of Swiss construction. Shadows cast by deliberately planted and trimmed trees on either side of roads add an organic element to this design. Because of my own experience of a life as an immigrant worker in Kolkata, I am from the state of Jharkhand, I felt connected to the roadmen in Aarau, most of them are migrant workers, coming from the poorer parts of Europe. Their language skills in English are as imperfect as mine; they often have similar difficulty communicating with their Swiss colleagues as I have with the local people I meet. In our equally broken English, we managed to converse about our life: the wages, our dreams and of the opportunities to come. I am as curious as they are to know the reasons for us being in Switzerland. Through our conversations and observation, I learned how they work in teams, where they come from and how each team is specialized in a different layer of the road. The teams often leave accidental images on the surfaces – sometimes it is the imprint of a worker’s boot or the tracks of a caterpillar. Like the bas-relief fossils I could see in the Naturama museum those marks, signs and symbols evoke the possibility of becoming archaeological art effects of the future. Chunks of asphalt from those road side construction sites and twigs from the trees along the roads have become the essential elements of my artwork. The articles from daily life I carved in wood or I chiseled on asphalt are in stark contrast to the more basic objects I chose referring to the lives of immigrant workers back home in my previous work.

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LIVING SKIN AND THE DEATH OF A NARRATIVE

Large trees are often used by the villagers as a symbol of local identity. Local stories and folklore circulates around them and continues through generations. Moment comes when those big trees are chopped of to make space for “development”. The narratives die down slowly, creating spaces for newer narratives of power and fear. Symbol of an age old trees are being replaced by gigantic construction machines- markers of urban hegemony. Ruptured remains of trees retain these signs of decay and loss. The barks of these fell trees are collected as “memory tropes”:  engraved over as graffiti marks that try to re-narrate this nostalgic lore’s and moments of violence.

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