Since 2012 The Otolith Group has been developing work that engages with what the theorist Gayatri Spivak calls the “aesthetic education” of Visva Bharati, the art school founded by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore at Santiniketan in West Bengal, India, in 1921. Tagore chose Santiniketan because of its bucolic nature, and a relation to the environment remains integral to the school’s pedagogy and historical ecology. This ethos is evident in Tagore’s development of “tree schooling,” whereby lessons take place in nature under the shade of trees. The architecture of tree schooling involves minimal human intervention and is deployed as a methodology that challenges how we might understand decolonizing schooling today. The Otolith Group’s contemporary images of Santiniketan are collages working with archival images from the 1960s in Santiniketan, erupting the temporal divides.
Against a backdrop of global cultural flattening and surging nationalisms in India and elsewhere, these images suggest an enduring space for the hyperlocal. As a real place and as portrayed by The Otolith Group, Santiniketan inspires a reimagining of the space for learning in the past, present, and future.
