Roads and Stories - proposal and images

Roads and Stories is a project idea proposed to EMDASH Award 2013 of Frieze Projects, a programme of site-specific commisions shown at Frieze London each year.

Volunteers would be asked to show roads, paths or walkways where lot of people would travel keeping their feet on the floor where memories and experiential marks are imbued. The road will be photographed and a mold will be to capture the textures and forms of the floor. Depending on availability, volunteers and paid helpers will put the mold with the artist using rubber, fiber and plaster-of-Paris.

Then a casts will be made of archival paper pulp from the mold and will be painted using the photos taken and models of the roads will be re-constructed.

The size of the works would be 300cm wide, 100cm tall or extremely larger, fitting the wall sizes; thickness would be more or less 20cm. Size and the number of works will be determined by cost and other factors.

The works will be displayed on a wall of red and white vertical stripes, similar to the Hindu temple walls that are numerous in the North of Sri Lanka, where a 30-year war had made a devastating impact. There roads are being rebuilt and widened. The sense you get when engaging with reluctant locals, is that these development work is unsolicited. There is a nostalgic feeling towards the old broken roads of the war-time, which were proudly their roads.

In bringing roads into the gallery space, the artist would like to bring to focus the broader post-war socio-cultural issues in Sri Lanka.

One large work would be separated into 10x10cm block where the artist, volunteers and may be spectators engage in painting the pieces to fit into the whole.

In engaging volunteers and spectators the artist would like to go into a dialogue of lingering issues of a post war era in his own country.