John CF

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA enables a cross-disciplinary artistic exploration of the inter and intra-connectedness of food, land and community. John C F will be the Coordinator for this project. 

The collaborators on this project include Aziz TM, a visual artist; Pratheesh MP, a poet and visual artist; Kala Chandran, a scholar on local history; Pradeep, Prajitha and Ramya, members of the Paniya community; and seed keepers from the farmers’ collective Fair Trade Alliance Kerala (FTAK). 

John CF is a visual artist and a social activist based in Bangalore. After completing his studies in philosophy, he trained under veteran artist Jyothi Sahi. John’s solo and collaborative works have received national and international acclaim. He was selected by the BBC Radio as one among 12 artists internationally whose individual approaches have led to innovations in their field. His artistic works, including installations and art events blur the lines between performance and presentation, art space and the real world.  Much of his work has been in collaboration with fellow artists, and communities connected to the forms and spaces that he is involved with. In recent years, he has taken to farming. He understands land, not through maps or as real estate but through an imaginative perception of the earth through the trees and grass that grow from it. His recent works bring back memories of land, by exploring its infinite shades and textures. Given his experience, he is best placed to be the Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA. 

Between 1993 and 2003, John initiated and facilitated eight interdisciplinary art projects with the collaboration of a few artists from Bangalore. These projects which included exhibitions as well as creative processes outside gallery spaces, resulted in bringing forth new materials, forms, artistic language and space, redefining certain parameters of art, where the land, sites, public spaces, and communities became integral to the making of art. Drawing insights from over a decade of such a practice, followed by over a decade and a half of community-based interventions and introspection, in 2016, he initiated a new art project with FTAK. The project was based on a deeper intervention with the agricultural communities, exploring the possibilities for an aesthetic of regeneration. It looked into seeds and seed keepers and tried to find ways to reclaim the intimate reality of the farmers. 

In the current project, titled Ottamuri Veedu (a single room house, in Malayalam) John and his team will engage with the farming community more profoundly on specific aspects and places of knowledge and food. Here, knowledge is not brought in from outside but comes from the lived experiences of the community. For instance, John says, ‘they do not speak of calcium intake as knowledge, but with the culture, the knowledge finds its body. It is also embedded in their perception of taste, health, and a way to connect the land and community . . . at the same time, this knowledge has political and geographical significance.’ In this project, the aim is to try to understand how art can be embedded in its context; in other words, how closely bound the word and meaning are. The focus is not on the artist or the art. But instead, the artist, the arts, and the community's interests all work into each other.

This artistic exploration involves engaged conversations and walking through the fields with elders and seed keepers of the tribal communities around Wayanad. There will be three workshops with the elders and youth of the Paniya community. These workshops will attempt to bring together a sharing of food, storytelling and singing, in order to find connections between the body, food, land and community. There will also be conversations around tools of labour and their relationship with the body and land. 

The entire process will culminate in an exhibition that will take place in Wayanad. This exhibition will generously draw on folklore, traditional practices and native wisdom, expressed through songs, stories, sayings, food, cultural practices, images, materials, seeds, and language. An artist book has also been imagined as an upshot of the project. The book, like the exhibition, will also comprise of images and text, stories and songs, along with fragments of documentation, the team’s reflections on the land, its people, their cosmologies and insights into the works of art that are embedded in the farmer's lived reality.

The outcome of this project will be the exhibition and the artist book. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA along with the final reports will be copies of the artist book and photographs and video documentation of the workshops, the process and the exhibition. 

This project suitably addresses the broad framework of IFA's Arts Practice programme. As a project where an evolving process shapes the nature of the final production, this work focuses on the significance of process in artistic creation. It also liberates the understanding of Productions from being tied to pre-conceived outcomes, to being one that is embedded within the process.   

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is made possible with support from Parijat Foundation.