Sharath Nayak

This Grant was amicably cancelled based on reasons mutually agreed upon by the Grantee and IFA due to unavoidable circumstances.

Sharath R Nayak is a Bangalore based architect who has been working on environment-friendly alternative technologies of construction. He has trained as an architect from Manipal Institute of Technology, Mangalore University and Chur Institute of Architecture in Switzerland. Sharath is one of the founder members and directors of Biome Environmental Solutions, which is a Bangalore-based design firm focused on ecology, architecture and water. In this project, Sharath will be working with Ishita Shah and Vivek  Muthuramalingam as collaborators on behalf of Biome. Ishita is a designer and historian, and her practice revolves around the idea of curating for culture. Vivek Muthuramalingam is a documentary photographer and artist. 

With this grant, Sharath will lead a series of participatory art events in the surrounding villages of a few industrial campuses to trace the unacknowledged story of life here which was a part of the formation of Bangalore as a metropolis. The project will attempt to trace the stories of the city’s growth, through a holistic approach of preliminary research, engaging with the communities through curated walks, performances and workshops, and celebrate contributions, both institutional and personal. He will explore the locality in the city between two arterial roads - Bellary Road and Tumkur Road - which has a spectrum of industrial, military and governmental campuses like Bharath Electronics Limited, Hindustan Machine Tools, Indian Air Force station, Gandhi Krishi Vigyan Kendra and the Rail Wheel Factory and its surrounding villages such as Jalahalli, Narasipura, Kammagondanahalli, Abbigere, Kodigehalli, among others.  

Through this exploration, Sharath wants to highlight the undeniably significant role played by the suburbs of Bangalore, called upanagaras, in driving the city’s growth, which have been unfortunately kept out of the city’s narrative. He wants to address the disdain for neighbourhoods that are not ‘historical’, by tracing the life in these upanagaras and bringing the stories out. There will be three major stages in Sharath’s exploration that include collection of stories, mapping and interpretation of the findings and creative visualisation of the cultural narratives. 

Sharath will identify key members from the community to engage in the participatory methods of creating the final content. Various tools that he will employ to enable this process are community workshops, drone photography, curated walks, restaging past events, designing digital archives, exhibitional panels, short films and photo essays. The outcomes of this project will include a digital archive of the collected stories, curated walks and performances led by the members of the community under themes such as biodiversity, culture, architecture and spaces, nostalgia and personal memory, followed by a travelling exhibition to showcase cartographic representations reflecting personal experiences of the community members. 

At a time when the central government is on drive to privatise PSUs which will almost certainly change their demographics, IFA finds it important to support this project that explores the narratives of the life in some of these PSU campuses that have been unacknowledged in the narrative of the city, in spite of their significant contributions to its making. Sharath’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be a detailed textual and illustrated document of the curatorial process and outcomes, photo and video documentation of curated walks and performances, publicity materials, soft copy of the digital archive, soft copies of exhibition panels and cartographic visualisation, short films and photo essays.