swarajyalaxmi

Performance, banana leaf, audio
2023, Shown in the To Be-Named exhibition at Opalka Gallery in Albany

Swarajyalaxmi is a work about my centenarian grandmother, her namesake, her life, and how translation mediated our relationship. For this work, I developed a system of translating names into visual patterns inspired by kolams, a type of pattern traditionally drawn on the floor with rice flour. During a performance, I draw the pattern signifying her name. I also play audio from an interview with her a month before she passed away at age 101. The audio shows how my grandmother’s name signifies independence in the colonial context, and the interview also highlights her resilience in the face of patriarchal oppressions such as being married at age twelve. Next to the performance, is an etched banana leaf. Banana leaves are part of a mourning ritual that honors three generations of the deceased. While this ritual normally follows a patriarchal line (my grandmother, her mother-in-law and her mother-in-law’s mother-in-law), I worked matrilineally, etching three patterns representing Swarajyalaxmi, Kameswaramma (her mother), and Rajyalaxmi (her grandmother).

For this work, I developed a computer program that allows me to generate Kolam designs that are embedded with the names of my family. I primarily focus on my paternal grandmother’s name, Swarajyalaxmi, and then her mother and grandmother: Kameswaramma and Rajyalaxmi. To encode their names into Kolam designs, I first translate each character into an eight-digit binary code (made from only 0s and 1s). I then map this code onto my starting grid of dots (moving left to right and top to bottom). I use the center of the grid as extra space to work with a grid that may contain more dots than characters. Using this grid as a basis, the algorithm then fills in the sections with looping components, but making sure to never connect dots associated with “0” to those associated with “1”.

You can read more about this system of translation here and here.