Apparently my grandmother kept her wedding sari in a chest at the foot of her bed for most of my life. One sleepy morning, she plucked it from a sea of fabric and gently placed it on her carpet, deciding it was time to sift through her hidden collection of sumptuous silk saris and air them out regularly. I gaped at the faded sari, some kind of legendary family artifact that I had only seen in photographs since my childhood. She shrugged and continued to remove the clothes from the chest. The shimmering threads bathed in the sun and breathed for the first time in months as each stitch revealed a flood of memories; Ba knew exactly when and where she had worn them all. Each saree had a story to tell.
It would be too easy to draw from this anecdote a metaphor for woven heritage. I can’t stand it today, when social media is already flooded with empty metaphors that sound on the one hand residual nationalism and expected indignation, mixed with truly revolutionary assertions and poetry for the upcoming fight, on the other. My pessimism struggles with my patience.
Instead, I take myself back to a May afternoon when I went to Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens. Just like today, it was unseasonably hot and I was in a very bad mood and nothing could help it. But as I strolled a path through the little haven of plant life, art and solitude overlooking the East River, hives of orange, blue and gold fabric swayed gently through the tree branches, making Impossible to worry about anything else. .
The works were part of a series of soft sculptures titled porridge (2023), named after the word “fruit” in Hindi/Urdu and other Indo-Aryan languages of South Asia. I had long admired Indian-Guyanese artist Suchitra Mattai, whose otherworldly weavings, embroidery, and mixed media art live freely in my head. I had even spent time with his pieces in a gallery once or twice. But the techniques and philosophy at the center of his practice hit me hard in We are nomads, we are dreamershis first public art installation. Walking along the path, I arrived at the main element of the exhibition: a circle of what the artist calls “monuments to transform”.
“Many monuments commemorate heroes, heroines and people in power,” Mattai told me in an interview in June. “So I asked myself: How can I create a monument to this feeling of transformation that we feel every time we move from one place to another?
Change, evolution and cyclicality are literally built into the sculptures themselves, which Mattai said aim to both sprout organically from the ground and land as glacial artifacts from the future. Made from used saris from India and New Jersey, the woven patterns attached to a metal frame descended toward the center of the circle, as if forming strange spokes in an invisible wheel. The fabric had already begun to fray when I visited, but that sense of alteration was precisely the problem: not knowing how the elements, visitors, plants, and non-human life might alter the sculptures during their time in the park. Even the mirror-polished stainless steel that covers each sculpture changed every day, creating a unique portrait of the sky above.
Other gifts held close by: designs on the frayed saris, which still bore the touch of their creators and previous wearers. Delicate flowers, bold geometric patterns and dense multi-colored patterns give the sculptures a spirit of comfort and solidity.
Nearby, in a plot titled a nomadic gardenseeds of flowers and medicinal plants native to North America, South America, and South Asia were just beginning to bloom. The bleeding heart and swamp mallow of Turtle Island grazed on jasmine and bird of paradise, and turmeric grew well.
Marisa Prefer, senior director of park operations, planned the garden with Mattai. Prefer explained the carefully selected group of plants, adding that they wanted to embody “the idea of a healing garden as a balm in terms of migration and what we take with us.”
Although the exhibition ended in August, Mattai’s fabric and flora garden visualized both the specificity and connectivity of the diaspora without sacrificing one for the other. This is a rare feat in an age of lazy understanding of immigration and siled self-interest disguised as universality, especially for us dominant-caste South Asian diasporas who are complicit in both the government’s Hindu fascism Indian and casteism in the United States (see: Dalit journalist Yashica Dutt on Kamala Harris Brahmin background). Although I find the platitudes and allegories unconvincing today, I continue to find comfort in the memory of my encounter with the gentle sculptural giants of Mattai, those antidotes to the trappings of hair-raising nationalist monuments and waves waves of saris which composed them. Ba’s sari could very well have been part of it.
