KOCHI: Sahil Naik’s work transports the story of a village named Curdi and its people to the ongoing Kochi Muziris Biennale. The life-scale sculptural installation recreates a lost world. With 5.1 sound and three original compositions from the village, Sahil recreates the village and documents the story that reframes memory, resists erasure and attempts to restore the identity of a land and its people.
In 1961, soon after Goa got its liberation from Portuguese rule, the state’s first chief minister Dayanand Bandodkar commissioned a modern dam. Though there were concerns about how the reservoir would submerge 20 villages, forests, mangroves, fields and water bodies around it, the dam was built.
Ten years later, the water levels started to rise, submerging the landscape bit by bit. The villagers were forced to move and over 3,000 families were relocated. In the 1980s, during the summer, when the water level went down, Curdi, one of the abandoned villages resurfaced, giving space to its former inhabitants. Since then, every summer, hundreds return when the water recedes.
Sahil has been working with the people of Curdi for the past seven years, documenting the landscapes and oral histories. “Curdi is a village adjacent to mine. I have tried to look at the stories of the elders who know the village before its submergence, the impact of climate change and the water on the structures, and the changing rainfall patterns and flash floods. My work is a collective history of the community that once lived in Curdi,” he says.
Sahil worked with the natives, converted their stories into lyrics and composed three folk songs. “The village now exists only in their memories. Due to global warming, the landscape keeps changing and the water is getting hotter. In the next five to six years, the entire village will vanish. For the coming generations, there won’t be any trace of their village. I have just collected all the memories and created a reservoir of them,” the artist says.