Artist Unknown, Mission School, circa 1849 Image Source
A good friend recently showed me an illustrative version of the Lord’s Prayer in Maori.
I noted that it was credited to the National Library here in Wellington so headed over to see what related items were in their online archive. I came across the piece above – promoting an early mission school.
Thomas Kendall, Nuku Tawiti, 1824 Image Source
Alongside Maori adoption of Christianity, the archive also points to colonial attempts to understand local spiritual belief. Early missionary Thomas Kendall made this sketch of Maori gods – which he observed on carvings in 1824.
K.P.M. South Pacific Line, 1939 Image Source
Carvings feature elsewhere on the site – here on the cover of a promotion for a passenger ship run by major Dutch company, Koninklijke Paketvaart-Maatschappij. Framing Mount Cook they gave an exotic spin on the antipodean landscape.
NZ Railways, Auckland to Rotorua – the Thermal Route, circa 1954 Image Source
Switching from sea-faring to land transport, the Railways advertised its once popular route to my home town of Rotorua from Auckland. Rotorua drew tourists with its thermal activity, thriving Maori culture and welcoming hosts. The advertisement features a tiki alongside the train and Maori carving motifs.
Horatio Robely, Arms of Dr TM Hocken, circa 1900 Image Source
The tiki and Maori motifs were used again in this artist’s rendition of the initials of Dr Thomas Moralnd Hocken, who funnily enough headed to New Zealand to escape British winters. I can’t imagine he found much respite in Dunedin. A doctor, avid collector and historian – he donated his sizeable stash of books, maps, manuscripts and ephemera to the citizens of Dunedin in 1910 in the form of the Hocken Library.
Charles Hill & Sons Ltd, Models 27-49, 1897 Image Source
Fittingly, it was the good folk at the Hocken Library who had pointed out the Maori Lord’s Prayer to my friend – which I mentioned in opening as prompting my foray into the National Library Collection in the first place. Back home in Wellington I’ve been having a great time trawling the library archive discovering a wealth of local visual history. Hats off to the National Library – for old times sake:
Christmas Card, Kia Ora. For Old Times Sake, circa 1890-1910 Image source
Related posts:
A Wind-Swept Walk of Words
A selection of creative endeavors featuring SMS, social media and spam provide artful commentary on digital communication.
SMS Stitching – embroidered text messages track ebb and flow of modern romance.
Wildlife-Social Media Mash-up – blasé bird tweets on life in New York.
Spam One Liners – hand-lettered renderings inspired by junk mail subject lines.
Highlighting aspects of immediacy, attention and privacy – all three artists share a tendency to save what others may delete.
Related posts:
Still Life, Smooth Moves
Writings on Walls
New York-based photographer Kate Orne has focused her lens on Pakitsani prostitution over a number of years in an effort to expose the denial, modesty, pretense and cultural oppression which envelope it.
Young women from rural villages and refugee camps are sold to the brothels by human-traffickers, while others are born into the trade.
Prostitution is forbidden under Islamic law, but with the increasing influence of extremist groups, the women risk severe punishment under Sharia Law through beheadings and stoning to death.
The laws – both secular and sacred – seem to disregard the context in which women
have entered the profession while paying negligible attention to the men who engage
their services.
The women practice modesty according to Islam. For a woman not to cover her chest… is considered daring – even among prostitutes.
Proceeds from Orne’s print sales from the series May You Never Be Uncovered:
The Victims of Pakistan’s Sex Trade support education of the children of Pakistani prostitutes via the Sheed Foundation – “a small but highly efficient community-based organization addressing the social problems faced in particular by the local female sex workers and their children who suffer from oppression, poverty, illiteracy and abuse.”
Orne highlights cultural complexity through her portraits and studies which are both intimate yet modest. Her images don’t provide us with answers but rather confront us to question deeper the paradoxes at play surrounding prostitution. And I’d hasten to add that they are not limited to Pakistan nor Islam.
Related Posts:
Fashion, Humanism & the Online Environment
Still Life, Smooth Moves
I first photographed the work of French street artist C215 in Paris in 2007. This week here in Delhi I hit the streets of Karol Bagh to see if I could find any remaining examples of the works he produced in the vicinity late in 2008. It proved to be an ambitious task which led to many alley-way adventures.
Christian Guémy (aka C215: self portrait above in Delhi) resides in Paris where he has developed his distinctive street-art style. Armed with a Masters in Art History from Sorbonne and an arsenal of aerosols plus painting paraphernalia, he hits the streets with persistent zeal. He has taken his skills further afield to Casablanca, Dakar, Jerusalem, Sao Paulo and beyond, alongside gallery showings in Paris and London. He has collaborated with the Norwegian Children at Risk Foundation (CARF) to raise money for their projects in Brazil – where he also visited to give workshops to local youth and make his mark in surrounding favelas.
Back here in Delhi I located a handful of C215’s works which have survived. One old woman in a poor neighbourhood recalls “They brought so much energy to our area with children all crowding round to watch this strange foreign-type painting just for the love of it.”
Guémy gifted some works on paper to various locals plus stencilled t-shirts for young onlookers and boxes for shoe-shine boys. He fondly remembers one shy girl whom he gave a framed work – indeed she was too shy to be photographed by me with the piece but was happy to take it down from it’s proud perch in her tiny home and let me capture it being held by a neighbour. [below left]
Along the way I encountered frequent examples of Indian vernacular flair – from rickshaw decorations to juice stall signs – showing that creativity is alive and well in this crowded corner of Delhi… both local and imported.
Related posts:
Street Art International (Flickr)
Street Art Gets Behind the Wheel
Visitors to India are frequently enchanted by the spirited decoration of trucks which traverse the nation. We are immediately drawn to the quaintness of English phrases like Horn Please which are commonly emblazoned on the rear of commercial vehicles.
However we often miss the assortment of Hindi phrases – the most common of which reads Mera Bharat Mahan (मेरा भारत महान) meaning My India is Great. This patriotic declaration was popularised by former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in his campaigning efforts to evoke a spirit of modernity across the nation. It went on to become a favoured proclamation of Indian cricket fans. The slogan prevalently graces the tailgates of trucks which cross state and cultural boundaries in a diversely painted salute to national pride.
Sometimes the sentiment is translated into English…
And other times things get a bit jumbled…
Related posts:
Indian Street Graphics (Flickr)
Street Art Gets Behind the Wheel
Last week in Mumbai someone kindly explained to me the custom of putting wall tiles of gods from different religions along street facades. They’re positioned at pissing height – and act as a perfect deterrent in a reverent nation.
Related Posts:
Illuminating Urban Imperfections
Same, Same But Different
What do laundry and lunch delivery have to do with my favoured intersection of communication, culture and creativity? Well, in the case of Mumbai’s Dabbawallas and Dhobi Ghats – quite a lot. Via their respective coding systems, both enterprises are able to track items within their service chain to ensure accurate delivery.
The Dabbawalla service entails collection of freshly prepared meals from the residences of suburban office workers from vast reaches of the city, delivery to their workplaces and the return of empty lunch boxes (dabba or tiffin) to its original home – all for a reasonable monthly fee. Delivering over 200,000 lunch boxes each day to workers who have diverse eating habits (often governed by religion) requires an accurate system – especially as each lunch box commonly passes through the hands of at least six men, in quick exchange, on its path from home to office and back again. Most tiffins are collected by bicycle, sorted into destination groups, then carried together on trains and cycled to the offices of their respective customers. In between they are commonly carried on hand pushed carts and large head-balanced trays – all while jostling with chaotic Mumbai rail and road traffic.
With low literacy being an issue for some of the 5000 dabbawallas, they have devised a coding system using colour, symbols, numbers and a few letters which is painted on the lids of the tiffins to indicate the train lines, hub points and destinations at both ends of the delivery cycle. Each part of the marking can be understood by the relevant dabbawalla as the lunch box exchanges hands through the service chain. In the case that a lunch box gets on the wrong path, the code allows it to be set back on the right track – yielding only one mistake per 6 million deliveries according to economic analysis.
The Dabbawalla’s have been operating for over a century and the business continues to grow at a rate of 5-10% per year. When I asked about the effects of the economic downturn I was told with a smile that “the stomach knows no recession.” Their innovative localised system has been studied by business schools worldwide and covered by international media including the New York Times. As a brand strategist I also note an additional factor that contributes to their iconic status in the city: the dabbawalla’s signature Gandhi cap. This further serves as a recognition device between workers at busy exchange points and failure to wear one attracts a fine from their registered co-operative association.
The Mahalaxmi Dhobi Ghat is the world’s largest outdoor laundry which processes three quarters of a million items daily from households, hospitals, hotels and schools.
With articles to be washed, dried, starched and pressed coming from distant neighbour-
hoods to this central location – they have also developed a coding system to track and assure accurate return. Many customers dispatch their laundry to local hubs which send in bulk orders to Mahalaxmi. Each laundry hub attaches their articles with a scrap of cloth bearing a code penned in indelible ink – indicating the short-form name of their hub and their total number of articles over the recorded individual item number.
Workers in both systems are proud of the value that their services provide to the megacity. Together they exemplify the virtues of bottom-up innovation and entrepreneurship at play in this densely populated urban centre. Most dhobis and dabbawallas are migrants to the city – but in the words of 65 year old dhobi walla, Jan Mohammed [pictured above]: “There’s no city like Mumbai.”
Related links:
You can see and read more on my Flickr sets of Dabbawallas and the Dhobi Ghats
and I have upcoming pieces on both services being broadcast on Radio New Zealand.
My partner in crime from Hong Kong days, Oriana Reich, has curated an exhibition Cultural Confectionery for the week long Detour festival. New York-raised Oriana is a creative visionary who works globally and is currently back in Hong Kong dishing up a wealth of delectable treats from graphic design to culinary arts. Her imminent show brings together such passions and exemplifies her multidisciplinary approach.
“Cultural Confectionery aims to convey the fundamental notion that food is a cultural expression. Through exploring the relationship of Chinese confectionery to identity and culture, our exhibit will include a classification of Chinese confectionery, highlighting types local to Hong Kong and those that are part of a confectionery diaspora. The exhibition is a record of sweet memories: the stories, memories and traditions that surround our relationship with sweets. A series of photographs by Grischa Rüschendorf will explore local bakery and cha chaan teng culture, sharing a vital part of Hong Kong’s urban landscape.”
Acknowledging the reliance of our food experiences on smell, Oriana has indulged in a spot of olfactory alchemy to enhance the sensory and nostalgic qualities of the exhibition. She sought the input of San Francisco-based scent sorceress, Julie Elliot who dispatched a selection of nine scents for Oriana to blend for the show.
Get it while it’s fresh – between November 27 and December 9, 2009.
Related articles:
Still Life, Smooth Moves
Fruitful Pursuits
My jet-setting former student, Sagarika Sundaram, recently touched down in London long enough to complete a 3 month internship with multi-disciplinary design firm Pentagram – between stints in Zürich and Dubai.
While there she assisted Pentagram partner Harry Pearce on his project for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) which provided graphic training tools for the Russian police. Employing national abbreviations (GB, US, RU, etc) the folding posters presented comparative data surrounding drug abuse, intervention, therapy and health related consequences – as a way of clarifying various aspects of drug policy during training sessions. (English versions shown here, with Russian versions being used on the ground. More posters can be viewed via Pentagram)
Sagarika’s input involved exploration of the folding component of the posters – a realm in which she has developed skills through her previous work on dimensional projects. Above she experimented in typography composed from playing cards to transform her understanding of 2D-form during her time in Baltimore.
And of maps, Sagarika has a few observations based on her extensive global forays:
“In India maps are not prevalently used – I think due to the immediacy of existence. People will go as far as they know then just ask where to go next. And it works in that context. Elsewhere people like to know from the outset where they are heading. I find that in Europe, maps take on added significance due to the proximity of interacting countries. It seems that European nations, in part, are defined by who they are bordered by.” [I caught Sagarika in Berlin this morning on Skype]
When I met up with Harry Pearce recently in New Zealand he noted that Sagarika was definitely one to watch – although we both agreed it was hard to predict where in the world she would pop up next.
Taking inspiration from the other side of the globe, I recently implemented a weekly Learnings Initiative amongst the crew at Tardis Design & Advertising – where I consult from time to time. I’d come across the What I Learnt Last Week approach from the good folk at thinkpublic – a celebrated London agency that applies design to improving service experiences in the public sector.
Back here in the Antipodes we each present our learnings as part of weekly Tardis Time meetings. It’s our way of sharing and reflecting on the diversity of inspiration, skills, sightings and experiences that come through the office or touch our lives outside it.
A little something that honours the week that was… before launching into the one ahead.
