For Suchitra Mattai, Materials Are Vessels of Cultural Memories

Cultural artifacts are vessels of collective memories: symbolic elements that a community can identify with to find a sense of belonging and some of the most powerful statements on the status of a specific society. With a labor-intensive practice drawing from her Indo-Caribbean lineage, artist Suchitra Mattai creates works that evoke, preserve and translate traditions passed through generations, using the potentialities of materials to reactivate forgotten or erased histories and memories.

Mattai currently has an extensive solo exhibition at ICA San Francisco, “she walked in reverse and found their songs,” which examines themes of memory, history, belonging and subjectivity. Observer recently caught up with the artist to talk about the show and its focus.

Let’s start with the poetic title chosen for this show: “she walked in reverse and found their song.” Can you tell us more about what inspired it?

I wanted to create a show that explored how storytelling helps keep our memories and histories alive. Conceptually, walking in reverse allows us to experience the past, present and future simultaneously. This process enables us to honor our ancestors while “finding our place in the world,” as curator Ali Gass said.

Your practice relies heavily on experimentation with materials and found objects to explore their potential as repositories of individual and collective cultural memories. How do you choose the materials you work with?

Materials hold layers of meaning (sometimes literally), and found objects have histories and auras. Because I want to tell my ancestors’ stories, I often use culturally specific materials that are part of their vocabulary.

For example, the installations in this exhibition are made with thousands of used saris that are “woven” together. I also use found vintage furniture that speaks to a specific colonial past. My materials are sourced, found, and sometimes gifted to me by family and friends, often adding another layer of added significance. In recent years, my mom has taken up the project of hunting down materials for my practice. Now and then, I come home to find a box stuffed with heirlooms that she’s collected from people she knows or from her favorite thrift store in N.J., which she ships across the country. They’re care packages for the soul.

Those materials have stories, and interwoven global exchanges are part of their fabric. Your family’s history—they are Indian immigrants brought to work as indentured laborers in Guyana—profoundly influences your practice and migration experiences are often evoked in the textiles you transform into installations and sculptures. How do you think textiles came to have this particular cross-cultural role as a repository of memories, cultural legacies and heritage?

For many South Asian women, saris, shalwar kameez, dupattas, etc. are part of their cultural heritage no matter where they live. Textiles are often passed down from generation to generation. Because of this, they hold ancestral stories and can shed light on one’s regional history. Since sari patterns, weaving methods, trim, colors and designs differ from place to place, they reveal a lot about a person’s place of birth and migrations. The saris also hold migration stories from around different continents and speak to a connecting thread between women of the South Asian diaspora. In addition to their visual attributes, they also communicate through their various scents. Sometimes, I detect a whiff of perfume, traces of spices or even the ocean or the countryside. Their raw materiality transports me to other places and times as I work with them in the studio.

Then there’s the sculptural element of your work, which often connects more with your Caribbean side. This complex layering of stories and cultural traditions characterizes your exhibitions; you extend your narratives beyond the individual work and medium, as they are often interconnected once you stage them in a space. How important is it for you to build a story and translate it into the space?

Installation and sculpture are integral to my storytelling. I have been thinking a lot about the “memory palace,” the medieval mnemonic device that utilized architecture as a conceptual framework for housing information. In this exhibition, a replica of my grandparents’ house (“Pappy’s house”) made of tapestries hangs in the center of the ICA SF. Like many of the homes in Guyana, the house is on stilts. Close by, an installation reveals the interior of the house, a topsy-turvy world of undoing and rebuilding. It is meant to reflect the process of remembering, the ephemeral nature of memory, and the possibilities that arise in knowing the history that memory preserves.

Your work frequently deals with the gradual loss of cultural memories and identities due to the influence of a pervasive global culture. Do you think that contemporary art has any power to counteract or disrupt this process?

I believe contemporary art can preserve stories, rewrite histories and celebrate differences in the face of a global trajectory toward homogenization. I think the idea that I would warn against, though, is a fixation on “authenticity” in the face of the advancement of a global monoculture. Who has permission to tell a story can become very politicized. For example, because I am of South Asian descent but am from Guyana and many generations removed from India, sometimes people are skeptical of how “Indian” I am. Who can speak on behalf of a community ultimately becomes a power struggle.

You recently installed a sculpture at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York. Can you tell us more about this project? What were the primary sources of inspiration, and what was your thinking behind a public sculpture that should be, by nature, a place of aggregation?

I wanted to create a work that considered Socrates’ spirit of community and ecology and its geographic position. Its proximity to the East River, a tributary of the Atlantic Ocean, a site of countless migrations and its location in Queens, which has been home to so many immigrants, played significant roles in the project’s conception.

In my practice, I aim to give voice to those whose stories haven’t been told. Becoming memorializes our ancestors, broadens our sense of “history” and defies the boundaries of what public art can be. The question for me is, “Why do monuments have to celebrate those in power? Why can’t they celebrate the process of transformation and adaptation inherent in the migrations of individuals and communities? Six “pods” made of saris and mirrored stainless steel comprise the installation. These organic shapes conjure glacial deposits that I experienced growing up in rural and urban parts of Nova Scotia. They are artifacts from the future. “Weaving” thousands of recycled saris together from South Asia and its many diasporas, I seek to rejoin a community scattered through colonialization or otherwise. My own family’s history of indentured servitude in Guyana, brought by the British from India to work on sugar plantations, feeds my desire to memorialize their lives, strength and perseverance. The saris fade and transform over time but maintain their strength and beauty.

“she walked in reverse and found their songs” by Succhitra Mattai is on view at ICA SF through September 15.