A postgraduate student of arts administration from the Università Bocconi, in Milan, Manuli was in Mumbai, coordinating a 10-day study tour of Mumbai's art scenario.
The Italian arts student knows just how to find the ‘real’ India
MUMBAI: Mumbai's art market holds glad tidings, and the malls many enticements, but “to find anything here, you need a landmark, not just a postal address,” says Dario Manuli, with the cheerful weariness of one who knows how to locate the ‘real' India.
A postgraduate student of arts administration from the Università Bocconi, in Milan, Manuli was in Mumbai, coordinating a 10-day study tour of Mumbai's art scenario for a group of 15 students and two professors from his university.
Managing even two appointments a day — given the city's geography, silent signposts and crowds — was “a challenge”.
The group visited artists in their studios in Borivali or Ghatkopar, then attended art openings and auctions at the other end of town, met theatre directors, art critics, urban historians and television producers, and observed the pure chaos of a Bollywood film shoot.
They drank beer at a popular Irani restaurant, that irreplaceable Bombay fixture — and took in, with the masses, a 70s Hindi movie at a cinema on Falkland Road.
“Mumbai is alive in every corner, it never sleeps, we are not used to that,” Manuli concedes, but it became the chosen city for this comparative research project — along with Berlin, New York, Los Angeles and Milan — not only because of the growing visibility of Indian art in the West, but also because of the size of the city.
“Big cities can incubate new art movements and innovations,” he points out. “A place like Mumbai is so rich culturally that it's important to see how artists and the intelligentsia deal with such diversity. We have to understand how the innovation process works, and through comparison, suggest new ways to policy-makers,” says Dario, particularly in a place like Mumbai, where real estate and development are playing a very prom-inent role, and “people have to be aware of the consequences”.
In fact, he plans to return to Mumbai next month to attend the Urban Typhoon workshop in Dharavi, organised by Pukar, the research collective, when professionals from various disciplines will come to Koliwada to produce creative urban designs for the future of the city.
It's a long way to come to relate book learning to reality, and Milan's Università Bocconi, considered to be Italy's most respected economics and business university, runs a graduate programme in Management for Arts, Culture, Media and Entertainment (ACME), one of a few programmes being taught wholly in English. The postgraduate course includes an optional study trip to other countries.
Manuli stresses that research of this kind is a sociological exercise that involves a close engagement with people.
He was deeply affected when artist Pradeep L Mishra took him to places that were of personal significance to him. “When people share because they want to spend time without any motive; that's when you really understand the other culture.”
Stefano Baia Curioni, director of the ACME programme, says, “The humanity and intellectual abilities of the people we met were impressive.”
People responded warmly to Manuli's research queries. Once he began participating in the art system, met people at gallery openings and forged close relationships, they willingly shared their contacts.
In Mumbai, a city of 20 million, where the elite still comprises a very small percentage, such sharing is done willingly, he observes, unlike Western cities where the cognoscenti is larger and therefore more reticent.
Manuli's disoriented face at the ticket window would have strangers offering to buy his ticket for him. With all this experience, Dharavi then will not be hard to find next month.
nandinijal@yahoo.co.in
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