Porosity Kabari - (Porous Junk)
February 2016
Porosity Kabari is an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, collaborative project whereby Australian object designer Trent Jansen, and architect/sculptor Richard Goodwin, will work with Indian graphic/object designer Ishan Khosla as well as students from ISDI Parsons Mumbai.
The project challenges these designers to collaborate in Mumbai’s ‘Chor Bazaar’ (thieves market) and ‘Studio X’, using the bazaar as their only source of materials and making processes. In the bazaar, the designers will learn from spontaneous conversation and experimentation with the vendors and crafts people working in this manic market place. Conversely, Studio X will afford the designers a space for considered discussion and precise prototyping, in the development of refined ideas to be taken back into the bazaar.
How can something become something else? This is the essence of sustainable design in a contingent society such as India – a society without the common social safeguards of developed nations, one where the survival of each individual is determined by their uniqueability to be creative and resourceful. While the rest of the world struggles with the environmental implications of designed obsolescence and disposable consumption, India is a place where resourcefulness is part of the everyday. Found throughout India, ‘Kabari Bazaars’ (junk markets) and ‘Chor Bazaars’ (thieves markets) are the neighbourhoods where many of India’s useful things end up at the end of their long lives. It is in these bazaars that many useful objects are given a second life – car panels are transformed into ad-hock cookers and old clothing is quilted into rugs for snake charmers. Radical transformation at its best. Porosity Kabari will see Richard Goodwin and Trent Jansen travel to Mumbai, India, to work in a creative cultural exchange with local Indian designers. These designers will work collaboratively, immersing themselves in Mumbai’s Chor Bazaar for three weeks, working with the vendors and craftspeople who occupy the bazaar in order to learn from the radical transformation that can be found in this neighbourhood. During this period the designers will conceive and fabricate a series of sculptural furniture pieces that employ the skills of those who work in the bazaar, giving new form to the plethora of unique materials that are available.
Porosity Kabari headquarters will be at Mumbai’s Studio X, an open workshop for experimental design and research, run by GSAPP of Columbia University. The design development and prototyping that occurs in the bazaar will be rapid and spontaneous, in line with the frenetic pace of this neighbourhood, but Studio X will afford the designers a space for more considered conversation and collaboration – a space to develop ideas, make models, test materials, make prototypes and share project developments with the general public outside of the Chor Bazaar. The sculptural furniture objects created in Mumbai’s Chor Bazaar and Studio X will form the Porosity Kabari Exhibition. This exhibition will be presented to the culturally diverse audiences of India, by Mumbai’s Studio X in February 2016, and Australia, by Broached Commissions in September 2016.
Porosity Kabari Schedule:
Porosity Kabari Commences
1st February 2016
‘Works in Progress for (a) Better Tomorrow’
by Ishan Khosla-Design Thinker
630pm, 4th February 2016
‘Porosity Kabari’ Panel Discussion
- Trent Jansen
- Ishan Khosla
- Richard Goodwin
- Saleem Bhatri
- Rajeev Thakker
630pm, 11th February 2016
India Design Forum
‘Design Trail’ + Talks:
‘Small Spaces with Long Necks’
by Professor Richard Goodwin - Artist/Architect
‘Design Anthropology’
by Trent Jansen - Object Designer
630pm, 15th February 2016
Porosity Kabari Exhibition Opening
630pm, 19th February 2016