Oasis

Oasis: A collaborative mural at the 2^nd primary school of Tavros

Over ten days, children of Class E (10-11 years old) at the 2^nd primary school of Tavros set aside their math and language books. Instead, guided by artist Praneet Soi, they immersed themselves into the world of craft: observing, creating, using their eyes and hands to interpret, understand and reimagine their school environment on their terms. This hands-on approach is an integral part of Soi’s practice: thinking collaboratively, integrating manual forms of making and age-old visual vernaculars into contemporary forms. Soi suggests that non-hierarchical knowledge, along with the meticulous process of learning and producing together is something to be valued, cherished and enjoyed. He thinks of learning as a mode of being vital, aware, alert, deeply rooted in one’s place or land, echoing Munir Fasheh’s words: “learning by doing: by the person being embedded in life, in one’s cultural soil. In this approach, learning is almost synonymous to living.”[1]

During one of Soi’s site visits to the neighborhood of Tavros, he visited the 2^nd primary school and engaged with its students from the many co-existing communities in the area: Punjabi, Chinese, Moroccan, Roma, Albanian and Greek. He imagined ways of entangling their disparate cultural histories through processes of seeing, recording, image-making, with the aim of facilitating shared affinities and visual lexicons. Awakening thus, the understanding that images are migratory, like the stories they share, from one place or another. He proposed another form of ‘learning’, one rooted in the children’s very own experiences and one where they could lead a process of making, through their own curiosity. 

Challenged by the notion of making the slow process of drawing accessible and enticing to schoolchildren in an era of consumption of fast and poor images, Soi devised a drawing methodology that would make the attentive recording of the world around them attractive. In collaboration with the architectural office, A Whale’s Architect, he proposed a ‘drawing machine’ that allows users to simply trace the visual world around them. The device was inspired by a Mesdag panorama at the Hague where the artist stood inside a glass-cylinder and drew a panoramic view of the landscape, as well as the performativity of a film showing Picasso drawing on glass. A shared interest in craftsmanship and vernacular knowledge as tools for self-sufficiency and autonomy led artist Praneet Soi and a Whale’s architect to adopt a collaborative approach, learning from the skills of carpenters and metal workers in the vicinity of the primary school, to develop a prototype of the ‘viewing machine’ for the school programme. 

The pupils initially spent time tracing out the surroundings of their school in the semi-industrial area of Tavros: the school entrance, post-modern corporate offices, tree trunks, benches and leaves, a basketball court. These recordings underwent a circuitous process of visual translations and transformations, ultimately being selected by the pupils, scanned and projected onto the central wall of the school’s music room. With guidance from Soi, the children explored scale, color, pattern, line, rhythm, and multi-layered visual compositions as they painted onto these projections, gradually bringing to life their own mural in the school’s music class—a painterly depiction of their school as seen through their eyes. A joyful oasis in the heart of Tavros.  

Oasis is the first stage of a larger research project by Praneet Soi that will culminate in an exhibition at TAVROS in Spring 2025.   

[1]  Munir Fasheh, “The Trouble with Knowledge” presentation at EXPO 2000: A Global Dialogue on “Building Learning Societies – Knowledge, Information and Human Development,” Hanover, Germany, September 6-8, 2000.