Public Art Installation | 2017

What happens when you bring together a bunch of strangers for a shared activity? Could personal stories and rituals create connections? How can you retain a physical memory of those brief connections?

Let’s Spin a Yarn: People, Stories & Connections is a public art installation first created during the 10th Learning Societies unConference (LSuC) at the Bhoomi College campus in Bangalore, India. The LSuC is an annual intergenerational gathering of thinker-doers, a diverse mix of people including alternative educators, organic farmers, artists, artisans, activists, designers, ecologists and nature lovers, filmmakers, healers, social entrepreneurs, and more.

The installation consisted of steel pegs driven into the ground, to create a ‘sharing circle’. Each day the artist posted an open call for LSuC participants to meet on site for an hour from 4-5pm to “Spin a Yarn”. Over a period of 4 days, the artist facilitated the sharing of personal memories and stories. Colored cotton threads randomly passed hands during the process of the telling, resulting in a unique, physical network of people, stories and connections. The co-created installation was ‘uninstalled’ in a ritual that involved cutting, tying the disparate threads and rolling it into a ball of stories. Participants who made it to the closing ceremony passed the ball around before it was finally consumed by fire and released into the elements.

“Back in July 2017, I experienced a story circle at Kathalaya (Bangalore). Out of that seed grew “Let’s Spin a Yarn” – a temporary art installation facilitated by me and created by the public. I decided to try it out at the Learning Societies unConference – a platform where participants co-create an agenda together around what matters deeply to them. The experience ended up being a moving and spiritual social experiment. A year and a half later, I tried another version of this, smaller scale, smaller group and introduced some new elements. That was different because it moved away from the realm of public art and went back to being a sharing circle.”