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My Work - Baiju Parthan
‘Arpeggio for Abbe Faria’
Mumbai-based artist Baiju Parthan speaks about ‘Arpeggio for Abbe Faria,’ his photographic installation that features an outdoor sculpture found in Panaji, Goa, of an early 18th century Catholic priest, supposed to be the father of modern hypnosis.
Title: Arpeggio for Abbe Faria / Photographic installation/
Medium: Archival Print on Hahnemuhle Paper.
Year of Execution: 2008.
Dimensions: Final Arrangement Dimension Variable as per Installation/Exhibition Location/Space.
Exhibited at:
2009 – ‘Indian Contemporary Art,’ Palais Bendictine Museum, France, Organised by Gallery88.
2009 – ‘Retrieval Systems,’ curated by Ranjit Hoskote, Art Alive Gallery ,New Delhi.
‘Arpeggio for Abbe Faria,’ is a photographic installation project. The central motif of the installation is the outdoor sculpture of Abbe Faria (by Ramchandra Pandurang Kamat) situated in Panaji, in Goa on the western coast of the Indian sub-continent.
Abbe Faria was an Indo- Portuguese catholic priest who lived in Goa during the early 18th Century and is considered to be the father of modern hypnosis. Unlike Mesmer, who claimed that hypnosis was mediated through “animal magnetism,” Faria understood that it worked purely by the power of suggestion. In the early 19th Century, Abbe Faria introduced oriental hypnosis to Paris.
Apparently the pivotal character of the prisoner priest in Alexander Duma’s classic ‘Le Comte de Monte-Cristo,’ is modeled around Abbe Faria who did time in the dungeons for initiating an uprising against the Portuguese colonial masters. Faria is also considered to be a seminal figure in the freedom struggle against four hundred years of Portuguese colonial rule in Goa .
I have interpreted the enduring and historically significant motif of Abbe Faria as a node or a meeting place of private realities, public imagination and memory. ‘Arpeggio for Abbe Faria’ is also about the envisioning and actualisation of idealistic passions and their engagement with the process of time and the larger historic process.
My engagement with Goa began with my arrival in Panaji the capital of Goa in 1978 as a Fine Art student from Kerala. At that time I had no affinity for Goa as a place, nor did I know much about the history of the place except the fact that it was a Portuguese colony for a very long time. All I cared about was that there was a Fine Arts college and Laxman Pai the renowned artist was the Dean, and I had to join the college somehow. Coming to Goa to study art against the wishes of my family also meant that I was literally in a state of self imposed exile.
My first impression of Goa was that of arriving at some far away country, culturally very different from the India I knew. Everyone was dressed in western clothing, the architecture appeared to be very Mediterranean, some kind of hybrid operatic music wafted from loudspeakers, and everyone spoke English ! As I came into the city my attention was grabbed by a larger-than-life sculpture, right behind the old Assembly building in Panjim, of an imposing male figure having a remarkable countenance with intense eyes and arched brows, and a prominent forehead framed by swept back locks and attired in a long heavy overcoat, looming over an young European woman at his feet, who apparently has swooned or was being awakened from some kind of trance. At the very instant when I was engrossed in the incomprehensible eeriness of that sculptural tableau, a small group of revelers, a bunch of young women and men, came into the very same square and literally danced around the sculpture. The late evening light, the newness of the place, and the music and dancing figures and the eerie sculpture, together left a lasting impression. In a way, the experience became a portent, of the way the time I spent in Goa affected my life.
I spent seven years in Goa, studying art and doing other things. Which included getting lost on the hazy sunlit beaches of Goa where the final act of the hippie counter-culture movement was being played out. The spirit of the time was such that boundaries of race, colour, religion and origin did not come in the way of this unique experience. The encounter with the so-called counterculture of drop-outs or the flower children did have a very deep effect on me. It is in that environment that I was introduced to the writings of Carlos Castaneda, Timothy Leary, Ramdass, Robert Anton Wilson, John Lilly and other counterculture gurus of the Sixties and Seventies. It was a revelation in itself to realise that not to conform to the norm is a highly addictive adventure.
The installation is also an attempt to present one of my pet theories – Embodied information is memory, while disembodied memory is information, which is actually an interpretation of Merleau Ponty’s observation that the body is not one object among many, but our only means of belonging to the world, and the body’s spatiality is not coldly geometrical but situational.
The syntax of the work is similar to David Hockney’s Polaroid composites from the 80s. I made a trip to Goa for the sake of shooting the Abbe Faria sculpture, walked around and shot it on a digital camera from 360 degree angles. These shots were then sliced or fragmented into a mosaic and arranged into one large eight foot wide image to get a cinematic 360 degree montage grid showing sculpture not in its totality, but only as a presence. Copies of the images from this grid component were then separately framed as individual pieces and dispersed along on of the gallery walls following a random sequence dictated by the dynamics of the exhibition space. Along with the mosaics, a five foot image showing the sculpture in its totality but at an angle that obscures most of the details is presented as a visual key to help the viewer integrate the dispersed fragments. The intention of presenting the theme as an information-based installation was to mimic the way images travel on the Internet as binary data packets speeding along multiple network pathways and nodes to finally combine at the destination into the encompassing visual experience of the source image.
