Echoes of Earth gave Delhi an evening of printmaking, plastic turtles and live music shaped by India’s rivers
Printmakers were practising reuse long before the word became fashionable, since a single carved block can be inked and pressed again and again, and that idea sat at the heart of a preview evening by Echoes of Earth, the eco-minded music festival, at Delhi’s Dirty Good.
The Delhi Art Centre ran linocut and screenprinting sessions, where guests inked carved blocks, laid paper over them and pressed down to pull their own prints, and in a city where so much is bought, used once and thrown out, there was something satisfying about one block giving print after print.
At the Art for Nature workshop nearby, artist Manveer Singh, known as Plasticvalla, began by explaining how to sort waste before handing out used chips packets, which people folded, rolled and stuck together into turtles. These multi-layered packets, plastic and foil pressed together, are among the hardest things to recycle and often end up in drains and rivers like the Yamuna, so the turtle, a creature that suffers badly when plastic reaches water, made a fitting subject.
Both workshops tied in with Arteries of Life, this year’s theme about protecting India’s rivers, for a festival that founder Roshan Netalkar says was built “year after year, edition after edition” and now turns ten.
Later, TribalNeed and Shanka Tribe took over with loud live sets, and hands once busy with ink and plastic were soon in the air, as if the evening itself had been carved like one of those blocks, meant to be pressed again and again until it left a mark.