Video Short
Haiku Chronicles is proud to present a film produced by Kala Ramesh
HaikuWALL India —an attempt to bring haiku into everyday spaces.
Poet, Kala Ramesh has been instrumental in bringing school kids and undergrads to haiku in India. Her latest passion is to paint city walls with haiku written by her students, helping to weave a pause, a breather into hectic lives.
"One way of making poetry into action is through graffiti. While graffiti is frowned upon and considered illegal by the rest of the world, in India it gets the support of the property owners and in some places even of the government. It is not so much rebellious as reflective. "
FILM CREDITS:
Produced by: Kala Ramesh
Directed by: Payal Kulkarni
Cinematography & Editing by Kaustubh Joshi
Music by: Bapu Padmanabha
NOTE from Kala Ramesh
HaikuWALL India —an attempt to bring haiku into everyday spaces.
Art, in any form, is about interaction and participation. Art without an audience is just half the circle. As writers of haiku we are familiar with this truth. When art moves into museums, libraries, hardbound books and the internet, which are not places that everyone visits, art becomes inaccessible, exclusive and just for the educated and the rich, instead of being inclusive and for everyone. This is most striking with poetry, which is thought to be the first form in which we humans shared our stories. Two great epic poems – the Ramayana and the Mahabharata--have inspired Indians for generations.
If art does not become a conversation with the people from whom it is born, then what is the purpose of its existence? As Yusef Komunyakaa has rightly said, “the crime in all of this is that poetry, which can be transformative, belongs to everyone. Poetry is an action, and this is a fact I keep in mind.”
One way of making poetry into action is through graffiti. While graffiti is frowned upon and considered illegal by the rest of the world, in India it gets the support of the property owners and in some places even of the government. It is not so much rebellious as reflective.
Merging haiku with graffiti was something that evolved most organically in my mind during the Pune Biennale 2013 and 2015 Festivals. The organisers of Pune Biennale were so pleased with the haiku that architecture students wrote during the workshop that they decided to paint them on city walls, after securing permission from our local government. The idea behind this was that we should leave art and poetry to be discovered as a chance happening. Maybe a person walking down the road suddenly finds a haiku and says, "Hey! That's beautiful".
With this idea of ‘haiku as a chance happening’ I started off with the cities of Chennai and Bengaluru. I was lucky to get Poornima Sukumar, a well-known graffiti artist, to agree to paint two haiku on Bengaluru city walls. That was a big break and her graffiti are in the film. Poornima told me that she “called” her friends on Face Book! It became a Sunday morning activity for parents, grandparents and children to try their hand at painting a wall.
The haiku on the walls was an idea that began to occupy all of my dreaming space. Every wall I saw I imagined a haiku there! But to document this into a film was never my idea. It was Jim Kacian who first suggested that this idea should be shared and that it would be good if I could make 17 films of 17 seconds for The Haiku Foundation’s 2015 Poetry Day.
Then began my search for someone who could put this idea into a film -- I tried 8 different film makers, amateurs and students of the famed Television and Film Institute of India, and spent almost 11 months over this, but it just didn’t happen. Recently, a friend of mine suggested Payal Kulkarni – a 20-year-old commerce graduate. She brought along her cinematographer, Kaustubh Joshi, and before my eyes, it started to take shape, shot by shot . . . haiku by haiku.
Three threads run through this film, interacting and illustrating the title:
HaikuWALL India —a montage
1st: The Hindus & the Buddhists believed that the five elements called Panchabootas – space, air, fire, water and earth constitute our bodies and are in everything. At death, everything is transposed into these elements of nature, keeping the circle alive as rebirth and new life takes place.
The 2nd thread is the way haiku were inserted into those relevant elements / slots. I would like to explain briefly how these five elements link to our five senses.
akash – ether :: sound
wayu – air :: touch
agni – fire :: sight
jalam – water :: taste
prithvi –earth :: smell
And finally, the 3rd thread is the ways in which my brilliant film makers, Payal Kulkarni and Kaustubh Joshi link and shift into their own creative spaces.
Enjoy the film!