Who Keeps the Craft Alive?
On inheritance, invisible labour and a disappearing tradition
2022–ongoing
Srikalahasti, Andhra Pradesh, India
On inheritance, invisible labour and a disappearing tradition
2022–ongoing
Srikalahasti, Andhra Pradesh, India
Who Keeps the Craft Alive? begins in Srikalahasti, with a form of Kalamkari sustained not only by skill, but by labour that is often invisible in the finished cloth.
The work is interested in the distance between the object and the conditions that make the object possible.
Kalamkari is frequently encountered through pattern, colour, heritage and craftsmanship. What is less visible are the bodies behind it: the women who work for long hours, the children who are drawn into the process, the families whose economic survival becomes tied to the continuation of the craft, and the social conditions that shape who carries this knowledge forward.
The work is interested in the distance between the object and the conditions that make the object possible.
Kalamkari is frequently encountered through pattern, colour, heritage and craftsmanship. What is less visible are the bodies behind it: the women who work for long hours, the children who are drawn into the process, the families whose economic survival becomes tied to the continuation of the craft, and the social conditions that shape who carries this knowledge forward.
The project asks what it means for a tradition to survive when the burden of that survival is unevenly distributed.
To speak of preservation is often to speak romantically — of continuity, ancestry, cultural memory and disappearing knowledge. But preservation can also involve exhaustion. It can involve exploitation, inherited poverty, gendered labour and work that continues because there are few alternatives.
The photographs in this study do not attempt to resolve that contradiction. They stay with it.
They look at making as both knowledge and necessity; at the hand as a site of skill, repetition and fatigue; at the ways a cultural form can be celebrated elsewhere while the people sustaining it remain precarious.
Who Keeps the Craft Alive? is therefore not only a study of an endangered artistic practice. It is a question directed at the structures surrounding it.
Who is asked to preserve tradition?
Who is allowed to leave it?
Who benefits from its survival?
And what does it cost to keep something beautiful from disappearing?
To speak of preservation is often to speak romantically — of continuity, ancestry, cultural memory and disappearing knowledge. But preservation can also involve exhaustion. It can involve exploitation, inherited poverty, gendered labour and work that continues because there are few alternatives.
The photographs in this study do not attempt to resolve that contradiction. They stay with it.
They look at making as both knowledge and necessity; at the hand as a site of skill, repetition and fatigue; at the ways a cultural form can be celebrated elsewhere while the people sustaining it remain precarious.
Who Keeps the Craft Alive? is therefore not only a study of an endangered artistic practice. It is a question directed at the structures surrounding it.
Who is asked to preserve tradition?
Who is allowed to leave it?
Who benefits from its survival?
And what does it cost to keep something beautiful from disappearing?