Bricolage as a Method
Levi-Strauss's concept of bricolage, first formulated in La Pensee sauvage (The Savage Mind) in 1962, was originally presented as an analogy for how mythical thought works, selecting the fragments or left-overs of previous cultural formations and re-deploying them in new combinations
In the ‘Savage Mind’, Claude Levi Strauss uses the word bricolage to describe characteristic patterns of mythological thought. Bricolage is the skill of using whatever is at hand and recombining them to create something new. The Bricoleur who is the “savage mind” works with their hands in devious ways, puts preexisting things together in new ways, and makes do with whatever is at hand. For this course, i was particularly rethinking the idea of a feast. A feast is seen as a sturdy table with rich furnished cutlery, made best to suit the guests, with similar chairs made to comfort. But when the idea of a feast is reiterated, it is a platform where various personalities emerge out, coincide and refurnish ideas and personalities, then why should’nt the space we inhabit also reflect such an idea. The feast here is reimagined with cutlery of leather, chairs that reflect varying personalities and the table made unintensionally wobly with a thin wireframe of iron. All these ideas were expressed post reflecting on the derives we went on and from personal practices. Other ideas were rethinking the idea of “homely and unhomely” and the “library”
Derives
Getting lost in the city, is one of the most effective methods to meet new people, enhance new ideas and it strongly contemplates the ideas of chance encounters.
As my own bricolage practice of collecting and reading poems I created a collage of poems that resonates with various bricoleur's practices around me
Tossed a blanket from the bed,
Lay upon the back, and waited;
Dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which the soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling. preludes by t. S. Eliot
There is a house now far away where once
I received love
How often i think of going There
to peer through blind eyes
Of windows or
Just listen to the frozen air,
Or in wild despair, pick an armful of
Darkness to bring it here to lie My grandmother’s home kamala das
We were, by Dante, entertained
of things that were imagined,
of the things that there may arise:
hell, purgatory and paradise
Kitchens were places
We grew up in
High-roofed, spacious
They attracted us
With the pungency
Of smoke and spices.
“kitchens” taufiq rafat
And when, for feasters' midnight bout,
The ready bread is taken out, Waifs and Strays Arthur Rimbaud
हमारी दादी भी लिहाफ़ का ग़िलाफ़
जब भी मैला होता था,
सारे टाँके खोलकर,
उलट के कपड़ा,
फिर से उसको सीती थीं। paji nazmein by Gulzar
The feast is sweet. Birds wheel round
The remnants of the food.
Let us be dumb
This afternoon, not a gull's loud speech the feast – Galway Kinnel
Yet books consoled me when I was a child,
Banners on the Art Gallery's facade
Ripple and fap; in a collegial wrath, The Library BY TIMOTHY STEELE
And later, when she asks, i'll say
Some parts of it were beautiful.
How in their brightness
And sudden opening
The faces of the neighbors
Began to look like flowers.
“For my daughter” Kim Moore