The staircase leading up to the first floor of the French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP) today tells a story: in the literal sense. On each step is a sentence that pushes one to pause and ruminate. This is only a precursor to what is to come once you enter the all-too-familiar building with a yellow facade where mandatory vacation photos are taken.
It sets the context for the immersive world that waits inside. Sleepwalker Archives, a multi-disciplinary exhibit that spreads across the first floor of the building, is a delightful marriage of mediums — here, text, archival images, film and even physical objects come together in an attempt to re-interpret the existing wealth of archival material that the institute is a proud home to. The project initiated by the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) based in Bengaluru, selected curators Karthik Subramanian, Devarati Chakrabarti and Sujeet George to engage with IFP’s archives, 15 months ago.
The archives are three-fold; one with over 1,30,000 to 1,40,000 images of South India, largely Tamil Nadu, from the 1950s that include depictions of South Indian cultural aspects like temple imagery and documentation of Puducherry. The second, is the Stars Collection, a digitised documentation of images and materials from photo studios across the State while the third, points to the research institute’s exceptional herbarium collection with 25,000 plant specimens. The curators say that it took them a month to put together the set up.
A vie.
