When Saumik Chakraborty invited me to come to work and show in Kolkata, I knew his and his wife’s (Piyali Sadhukan) work was already quite good.

I had seen them showing together in Forum Schlossplatz, Aarau, Switzerland, and loved their work. I did an internship on curation at that time in that place. I already noticed that we all had much in common in our ways of working.

Saumik asked his friend, the art historian and curator Ayan Mukherjee, if I could show my work at his art space, A. M. Art Multi-disciplines, Kolkata.

And yes, I could. And I am very glad and honored about both invitations and to have gotten those subsidies from Kuratorium Aargau.

At the moment of Saumik’s invitation, we were in contact on Facebook and saw each other’s posts. I was working on pastel drawings of heads of women and men of unclear ethnicity, together with dog and cow heads.

At that moment, I felt lonely (winter in Bumblefuck) and was thinking about adopting a very small dog, like a Chihuahua, because those very small ones you can carry in a bag when you travel by plane.

Because I always try to root myself by finding old stories about what I work on, I started to research dogs in worldwide mythology. Dogs mostly belong to the moon, and the moon belongs to the feminine holy cycle.

At approximately the same time, I guess I saw a tiny crocheted skeleton of a female pelvis in Piyalis work, which idea I must have been stealing from her because female pelvis bones started to appear in my work too. I did that unconsciously and noticed it only a few months later.

I looked at that female pelvis bone and found it looked much like a big-eyed and big-eared animal head. Like a Chihuahua head. That is when my life situation, my plans to work in Kolkata, and my mythological research became one. I started to draw the animals in the female pelvis. There are also horned cattle. The reproductive system looks like a horned cow head. There can also be seen bogeyed and big eared bats in the pelvis bone.

All this can make someone think about ¨Bitch¨ or all the nowadays negatively connoted animal connections to the infinite feminine. In the prepatriarchal infinite feminine, those animals are linked to the winter side of the three-faced infinite female spirit. Spring/summer/winter. It is never separated. In death, there is birth; in birth, there is death. In joy, there is grief, and in grief, there is joy. It is healing and threatening at the same time. I also connected the meaning and appearance of those animals in Hinduism and the pre-Christian religions of where I live in northeastern France. There is the Big Red or White Cow, the female spring spirit, Damona from Bourbonne-les-Bains.

I researched them in many worldwide prechristian or nonchristian religions, and so I connected my living place with Kolkata and the world on many different levels. The personal, the mythological. The political. Because it is all political.

I mix all those belief systems in my work and show the output of my internet and library research in the form of printed texts and pictures. It becomes all playful (though I am very serious when I play); it is not scientific in any way; it becomes personal (and though political) mythology.

I first connect mythologically, and then I am:

Looking at female freedom fighters in India

The plan was/is that I would show in two different places: Firstly, in the art space “Art-Multi-discipline, secondly, in an abandoned building or even ruin, not too far from the first. Looking at female freedom fighters is planned to be shown in the second:

…..Later on, when Saumik had found for me a place to show, at Ayan Mukherjees ¨Art Multi-disciplines¨ and Ayan  had assigned me the civil war like partition of Bengal incited by the English colonists, to be a subject that I could work on  during my residency, I found it not to be enough part  of my specific work interests: ¨Empowering of Girls and Women¨, without glorifying them, but also questioning them and their roles, ( and myself and my behavior as a girl, a women, a mother, a postmenopausal ¨dangerous¨ ¨superfluous woman), and researched further about womens specific roles in that partition of Bengal and from there womens’ of all castes and religions of India in the freedom struggle from the English colonisation. From my middle-European female perspective.

Since I first started to write this text, I have arrived in Kolkata and am blown away by the power and many charms of this megacity. Almost from when I started to draw in charcoal the heads of the many female freedom fighters of India, I found them good, but a bit boring, so since I found Aryama Pals’ artistic work very good (I employ Aryama to help me with everything in this powerfully charming city), I asked him to mix in his own work in my fighters heads. In this way, the drawings that are placed outside the art space on 2-4 walls will become more part of the place, less Daniela.

Aryama had the idea to glue some of the giant (3,5–4 m high) fighter drawings and collages on the house walls outside the art space. Where also the weather can work on it, and where I wish also the passersby and the opening visitors to sketch their ideas on them, glue pictures inside, or write texts.

I researched a lot about Kolkata connected to Bourbonne and all the world mythology and her story.

Texts and pictures in English will be displayed, and the same in Bengali, researched by Aryama, plus vintage books.

The plan was also to employ at least two elder women, patua scroll painters, to work during the opening reception to connect the inner and the outer even more. Patua scroll painters work much in the same way I do; they paint everyday stories and mythology on paper scrolls and sing them. They are able to do so in public, which I am not. It will be good for the art space to attract visitors this way, and for the work itself, might it develop an amazing life of its own.

Finally, unfortunately I cannot employ Patua scroll painter women because I can’t afford it financially. I got state subsidies from Switzerland, Kuratorium Aargau, but not that much.

So I have to hope that the neighbors and passersby will engage and draw some inspiration from my work.

In a way, to make my fighters drawings and collages something very open that can continue to grow and transform during the exhibition, the works in the streets will stay there and become what they need to become; the works inside can be bought, or they will be sent back to Bourbonne-les-Bains, France.

Daniela Belinga Agossa