Last summer I traveled with Karmayatri to the highest motorable road in the world. This Christmas, a new adventure took us the Southernmost tip of India, where the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean meet the bay of Bengal. Down the West Coast from Mumbai to Kanyakumari: four bikes, ten yatri, innumerable sunsets, sunrises, beaches, backwaters and one long road that never ends...

The Camera Obscura Rickshaw I have created during my residency at Religare finally hit the streets of Delhi. What you see in this draft video is the image inside all around and above the passenger. Enjoy the ride!

The first session of this summer's artist residency TheWhyNot Place is coming to an end. It's been an intense month of non-stop work in Religare's building in Saket, New Delhi.
These are some of the beautiful people I had the pleasure of working and living with, and some of the stunning work they have created.
Strange things can happen when you put nine artists and a writer in a corporate building with a license to create...

Yesterday I had the pleasure of accompanying artist Jesse Bercowetz in a research visit to Hari Darshan Incense Factory. Jesse is looking into using incense as a material for his installation work for the Religare Artist Residency, and Hari Darshan's Director Pankaj Negdev kindly agreed to let him visit his factory in the industrial outskirts of Delhi. Moreover, he agreed to my tagging along with my camera and filming and photographing every step of the process.
Seeing how incense is made was on my list of improbable things I would love to do in India, so I was quite excited about it but I never thought the experience would be so overwhelming.
It was a feast for the senses: the colours, the textures, the sounds (ironically, smell seemed to take a secondary place). All the movements and repetitions, the people and the machines, the production chain working in perfect synchrony.
I will never light an incense stick again without thinking about the people and the stuff that make this commodity I buy so very far away.
You can watch some photographs in this slideshow. In the meantime, quite a lot of rather nice footage awaits my editing hand.

Last Sunday 24th April was World Pinhole Photography Day. Throughout the world exhibitions, workshops and competitions were organized to celebrate the most basic form of photography (pinhole=photography without a lens).
In India, one of my images (an all-night self-portrait) made it to the invite for Me Monarch, an exhibition of pinhole self portraits simultaneously held in Goa Center for Alternative Photography & Ravi Photo Gallery.

I am now having some fun preparing my forthcoming digital pinhole workshop with Photography Course London. I have to admit I am finding great satisfaction in defacing my brand-new-top-of-the-range DSLR with gaffer tape and bits of drinks' cans (a strange sense of revenge perhaps...?). First results seem promising, full of flare, distortions and wonderful 'mistakes'. 

Urban Creative Guerrilla to recapture the public space through artistic performance

On Saturday 16th April 2011 my Itinerant Camera Obscura (AKA 'The mountain goes to Mohammed') will take to the streets of Lisbon once again. 
ZAAT Collective, who commissioned the tent for the 2010 ZAAT Mostra, are collaborating with I Park Art to organise the Lisbon edition of I Park Art Day.

I Park Art is an urban creative guerrilla project that promotes the re-appropriation of public space through artistic actions. The idea is both simple and clever: participants buy a ticket for a space in a paying car park and turn it into a creative space for the day. By paying a fee, they enter into a legal contract that allows the temporary occupation of a section of the street, normally by a vehicle;  this contract doesn't normally specify which type of objects one can occupy that space with, and I Park Art Day uses this loophole to turn the streets into open creative spaces. 

The idea is available under a Creative Commons License and anyone with an idea for an installation or performance can take part. Participants for the 2011 edition include cities in Italy, Spain, Portugal, UK, Poland, France and more. There is still time to take part, either organising your own event or checking out what is happening in your city. Check the instructions and participants on I Park Art's website.