Friday, March 29, 2013

Picnic at Brahmpol

Picnic at Brahmpol 2013 | Installation Performance Video | Chiman Dangi and Brydee Rood

The painful condition of Udaipur’s streets and lakes is easily ignored by city’s denizens. Our conscience is dead. We do not care anymore or, may be, we are so busy with our personal and professional life that we are not able to contribute in the cleanliness of our surroundings; but that’s a lame excuse to make.

Hurt by the ignorance of the Udaipurites towards the nature, a freelance artist from New Zealand, Brydee Rood, along with a local artist Chiman Dangi, tried a unique way of arousing the emotions of the people towards the cleanliness of Udaipur’s lakes today at Brahmpol.


They named today’s program as ‘Brahmpol Picnic’. Both the activists wore orange plastic cloths and a huge orange plastic balloon over their heads which attracted attention of the passersby. In utter smell of the openly dumped garbage, they started their work by highlighting the garbage with colorful powder.

They also made a sequence of 100 silver colored paper plates to attract the attention towards the garbage. Thereafter, they did a videography of the dumped garbage to showcase it at various public platforms.

Chiman Dangi said, “We are strange people. When we do not receive rainfall, we conduct Yagya to attract the rain god. But after we get the rainfall, we do not even care to clean the lakes for the purity of water”. Brydee said that Udaipur is a beautiful city but people are ruining it by hiding from their responsibilities. They know about the harmful effects of plastic but still they do not stop using it.


It is high time when Udaipurites should stop behaving like an ostrich that hides its head in the ground when it feels danger. Dangerous effects of dirty lakes are a lot more intense than how we perceive them.

Collaborative Art Project 
Chiman Dangi INDIA | Brydee Rood NZ

Text by Gaurav Bhandari

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