The bus stop/ station/ adda/ depot is key to the Indian landscape. Connecting Partapur in Rajasthan, to Partapur in Uttar Pradesh, to Partapur in Karnataka is no small feat but our intricately networked roads do that sort of thing everyday. The buses that ply these routes halt at junctions that vary wildly but are evenly chaotic. Bombay and Partapur may not be sailing in the same bus but they’re pretty neck‐to‐neck when it comes to crazily organic and high‐strung bus depots.

The imminent edition of the Sandarbh Artists Workshops’ annual residency in Partapur, Rajasthan, invites artists to develop projects at the town’s bus depot, on the buses that make pit stops there and along the bus routes that emanate from the depot. In making the project itinerant, as it were, we strategically avoid the pitfalls of having an immovable epicentre, choosing instead to have several nodes of activity and engagement. In doing so, it is also our intention to mobilise the network, as both a metaphor and a geographical reality.

With this residency we hope to avoid the ever‐seductive trap of plop art, which doggedly colonises physical territory and has very little, or no, engagement with the community and its milieu. It will be critical to generate a form of public address that is audible, visible, graspable to the townspeople and that draws in even the most unsuspecting viewers.

-Gitanjali Dang  
Sandarbh International Artist Residency