An awesome Public EcoArt Project with the Metro Station in the vicinity
48° Celsius is the highest temperature that the city of Delhi, India has witnessed in its recorded history. 48° Celsius is also a reference to the exigencies of global warming - which can be felt in Delhi’s continuously escalating summer temperatures each year. Delhi, by any score, qualifies as one amongst the world’s most dynamic and complex urban settings. Like most other urban centers of this country and of the south Asian region, the city of Delhi is characterized by multi-layered historicity and multiple urbanisms that get expressed in varying conditions within its cultural and physical fabric.
With this as the backdrop, and as a combined Goethe-Institut and GTZ initiative, the 48c Public.Art.Ecology Festival was recently celebrated in Delhi. A large empty bucket, a tree hanging from a crane, a hanging garden for want of space, a crash landing, cycle-rickshaws as local story-tellers, a bamboo art, a step-well with a large inverted mineral bottle on top…Delhi witnessed it all this December!
The ambition of the 48c Public.Art.Ecology project was to interrogate the teetering ecology of the city through the prism of contemporary art. Through a number of art interventions in various public spaces in Delhi, the festival attempted to explore and investigate the relationship between public, public spaces, art, and the all the ecology! A total of 25 such art projects were installed in 8 carefully selected public spaces in the city.
The festival also emphasized the need to highlight the importance of green spaces, and related areas of ecological significance in the city. The most important output of the festival was the initiation of dialogue among the citizens on the pathway of development and the changes being made in the city in the name of making it world class.
The festival was fully supported by the Government of Delhi and the officials from the Government frequented almost all the sites. The festival also comprised walks, talks and public lectures on everyday issues of the environment. The underlying objective of getting people to public spaces in a city that not many really relate to being their own, was adequately achieved during the festival.
