Assignment 2 - Tagore Stories

The second assignment, which was a group one, was briefed to be a visual representation of the various spaces visited in two of Tagore’s stories, ‘Home-Coming’ and ‘My Lord, My Baby’ on the same page.

We used the river as the primary focus, navigating between the spaces of these stories through it. One other visual design tool that we used was to reimagine the branches of the tree as roads for the city and thereby connect these elements of the story, visually.

Group – Sarayu, Dhara, Mughda, Sayori, Medha

Assignment 1 - Home-Coming

The first assignment brief entailed a visual representation of the story, ‘Home-Coming’ by Rabindranath Tagore. My first attempt was abstract and a rather personal interpretation of the text.

Keeping this in mind, the second attempt was more reminiscent of a map. The idea was to visualize the two spaces mentioned in the story in a geographical context with each other. I tried to show the contrast between a city space and a village space, by depicting the former as more clustered and busy than the latter.

One of the most interesting observations to come out of this exercise was the variation in the reimagining of this space by different people, when in actuality, it was the same space being represented.

STORIES OF INDIA_LEARNINGS AND OUTCOMES

Learnings and Outcomes 

•The first two assignments seemed to have open new prospects for me – first studying space in context and second elaborating over it in form of detailed imaginative representation.

•The first assignment enabled me to enhance my skills in identifying space (physical, geological and emotional in particular).

•These two weeks of understanding, identifying, annotating and illustrating has been thought provoking and analyzing and helpful in strengthening my concepts of land and its various context one could place it in.

Assignment 1 - Tagore Stories

Stories of India

8.1.2014

15.1.2014

Assignment 1: Read ‘The Home-Coming’ by Rabindranath Tagore. Visualise and map-out the region mentioned within the text.

Assignment 2: Read ‘The Home-Coming’ and ‘My Lord, the Baby’ by Rabindranath Tagore. In a group, visualise and map-out the region mentioned within the text.

Group Members: Kristel, Sheona and Anwesha

Learning Outcomes:

Further research on the era the story was set in, the physical, geographical and political conditions of the given landscape.

Different ways of interpreting landscapes, as well as texts; and the use of various mediums to do so.

Reflection:

The first exercise was a preview of how the course has been mapped out. Both the stories, ‘The Home-Coming’ and ‘My Lord, the Baby’ were a good read and in fact, easy to visualise. In both the stories, there was a certain amount of freedom given to us while visualising the entire landscape - which was quite unique because everyone in class had different visualisations for the same story. I also enjoyed the fact that we could use any form or medium. Even though I am comfortable with digital drawings, this exercise allowed me to step out of my comfort-zone and manually map out my visualisation. The second exercise allowed us to do the same but it was more interesting because of my group mates as everyone had a different way at looking at things and the output was quite a mixture of our interpretations. The landscape had to be mapped out keeping in mind the era the story was set in, the physical, geographical and political conditions.

Reflection

My Lord, the Baby was an interesting way to start this course. The relatively limited descriptions of the landscapes in the story had a lot of potential to be visualized and drawn by hand. The landscapes in the story were woven so effortlessly into the body text, that fishing out these landscapes was challenging. I particularly liked the fact that this story was short, because this gave us a good and brief introduction to the exercises to come.

        The second assignment involved combining both the stories- My Lord, The Baby and Homecoming. This was an interesting exercise, as we had to represent the common elements of both stories, while also including the distinct elements present in each. A group-based project assimilates everyone’s ideas, and this exercise did just that- Everyone has something to add, which contributed to the final drawing.

Visual Representation of a story

When I took this course I had expected only reading and understanding epics in terms of their geographical locations. But on finding out that we had to visually represent these stories and their geographical context took my interest to another level. Our first assignment was to visually represent a story we had read. We had to represent the locations covered in the story at a visual level and how we think the entire town was mapped. I enjoyed this exercise as it allowed me to be very imaginative although keeping the story intact. It gave me freedom to express the way I thought the locations looked like and could have been like. And this is soemthing I had never done before. Hence, I would like to explore this idea some more! Though it would be challenging to work with epics I am still looking forward to it. This ice-breaker activity has given me a sneak into what the entire course would probably  be like and I am hoping it would be as interesting!