PLUMBING STATEMENT

Every community collectively creates something unique. The Savara in Orissa, for example, have a philosophically complex and outright beautiful cultural understanding of death. It adorns their paintings detailing an up-turned tree leading to the underworld and speaks through their shamans, who are women. The Savaras never die, ultimately their souls take the form of butterflies (see here). The Surma & Mursi in the L'Omo Valley in Africa have the most exquisite concept of instant body art. The beauty lies in using natural make-up to show one's creativity in an instant. And almost as soon as it is born it dies (see here). Mainstream Indians also have a unique gift to the world: Corruption. It is our art-form; it is our excrement; it is our cage. Everything we touch we smear and trap in our gift. It is grease that springs from our inequalities, strengthens them, and increases them. It is the most powerful - bureacrats-politicians-corporate honchos - who are the most corrupt; they make sure we remain a leaking nation. This space is dedicated to exposing those leaks, by itself leaking documents that make us better understand our own excremental art form, in all its pervasiveness, its uniqueness, its destructiveness. It is an initiative to plumb the depths of our ocean of corruption. This space is also dedicated to documents that show how our corrupt and unequal system is destroying older systems of knowledge, of freedom and equality and beauty that still exist in some pockets of our myriad tribal and nomadic communities.