It is 10th December and been precisely a month since we have had Sqw:Lab open studio on 10th November. I left for Tokyo immediately after the open studio for 14 days. I was back to Bombay for two days and left again for Amsterdam and London for 10 days. I was supposed to write my personal reflection by the end of November, but I did not manage it while I was away from Bombay. Finally, I am sitting in my usual place, on the desk in the corner of the studio, and remembering the busiest month while feeling winter sunlight coming in the room with a shot of espresso. I remember that we made many cups of coffee during the week in Bombay!!
Katsushi Goto, winter sunlight into a corner of the studio, 10th December 2018
No matter how many workshops and parties we organise, it is always demanding to host the workshop in our studio/home, especially in the place was only completed a half year ago, and especially when there are not enough chairs. Nevertheless, I was so excited to have creative fellows to interact and play with, and inhabit our studio/home. Moreover, as I imagined, conversations and productions filled the space, and finally, the studio/home was lively and become a creative environment. First of all, I would like to thank all the fellows for coming and being part of the programme.
I must stress that although the programme seeks specific outcomes from the fellows, for me, hosting the programme in the space itself – which is designed by our design firm – is experimentation and a part of the long-term project. It was great to observe the fellows finding their own place to settle and work, arranging/re-arranging positions of cups, the way things are left for a night, a location that the fellow had a conversation, and especially how the kitchen platform accommodated multiple activities. It is not recorded in any formal manner that is useful for architectural planning but as I read the other’s personal reflections there are lots of narratives that connect the spatiality and content relationship. I am sure spending a week in an unknown studio in a foreign county is not enough time to make anyone feel like it is their studio or home, but the responses from the fellows points out the direction of my search for the spatial organisation beyond the limit of the home/studio.
[image] Katsushi Goto, seeing above the kitchen, November 2018
Apart from my own concerns, the energy of production and insightful conversations was an unforgettable experience that I haven’t had in a while. Though we had a schedule and a basic framework, the real driver of production was a fellow’s action/word and reaction/response of other fellows. In fact, I have never experienced (or maybe only once) such productive moments with an open-ended programme. We need to carefully observe where these intuitive actions and responses were heading to and nurtured within each fellow’s practice and consciously engage in the process of developing play projects while keeping these moments as starting and anchor points.
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