Recently finished with her post-graduate degree in Media and Cultural Studies from TISS, Mumbai, Yashsavi is originally from the mountainous state of Himachal Pradesh in India. Working across several mediums ranging from oil to film, her most recent project was a short documentary titled ‘Bhint (The Wall)’ exploring the occupation of space and the manifestation of power in an urban landscape, narrated inside a century-old building in the midst of demolition. Her work engages with ideas of impositional development and subsequent changes within various spatial settings.
30x30 cm, gouache on paper
Stumpy, yellow needles jut from the soil. My grandmother’s big hand gloves around my fist. The two of us flit around the winter field, setting fire to the dried-up corn stalks (“We call them tandu,” she teaches me). We scatter ashes to aid the summer crop (“We will grow taro-roots next” she smiles).
In the summer, our cow gives birth to a stillborn calf. He is white and crystalline. We bury him in one of the barren fields. A few weeks later, my father plants neat rows of low-altitude apple trees there. They grow green and tall.
Wild pomegranates ripen in the forest. Villagers take what they need, and leave the rest. The fruits fall with the seasons and rot into the soil. Birds peck at the split innards. The pomegranates return every year.
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‘A memoir’, is a collection of cyclic memories – repetitive and repeated – from my village. Regeneration appears all-encompassing – things grow, and rot, and grow again. Sometimes there is interference – fires, and burials – other times, we merely witness. The illustration is painted in the form of a memorial stamp – a mourning – as bulldozers arrive to level the trees. “We are making a highway” the person explains, “from city to here, it will take just five hours, lots of tourists will come to the hills to rejuvenate. Good money”. Black asphalt over damp, brown soil. Nothing pushes through asphalt.
