NAYANA

NAYANA. Ximena Labra 2023. Partapur, India.
As part of our artist residency in Sandarbh, I went with several artists to give talks at a school called PSP College, founded about 15 years ago.

The director commented that when the school started they only had 8 students. They were so disappointed that they decided to close it. One of the students was a deaf-mute girl named Nayana (which by the way means "eyes"). Nayana burst into tears when she found out she was going to be without a school. Her tears were such that the director decided that there was no way they would close that school.

Today they have hundreds of students of all ages.
I decided to show up in the schoolyard for three days and paint her name with water each day during recess at 1:40 p.m. when the sun was at its zenith. The water represents Nayana's tears that rise towards the sun as they evaporate, celebrating the fruit of her wish to go to school, and the fact that this action began on Makara Sankranti, a specially auspicios date dedicted to the sun in India.

The audience are the girls and boys who now study there thanks to those tears. Of the three days we did this performance at PSP College, two of them were recorded as time lapses- one was washed away by a mob of students, one was ok, and the third day, a proper video was captured in this wonderful documentation by the great Anke Melin.

I love this one because on the third day, the performance had become a thing, and the schoolmaster spontaneously decided to place a speaker in the playground and explain the story and the performance to the students. Some of them showed up at Sandarbh later, interested in creating art projects.