Extract from the book Retrieval Systems, edited by Ranjit Hoskote ((New Delhi: Art Alive, 2009)
Ranjit Hoskote: Alex, let’s go back to the beginning of our project. ‘Retrieval Systems’ evolved from my interest in memory as a condition, a resource, an archive or reserve of impulses, enigmas, images, complexes and patterns that all human beings, and certainly artists, draw upon constantly. What role does memory play in your art?
Alex Fernandes: One’s memory is what creates the ‘race mind’ and ‘racial consciousness’, as Jung puts it. The Goan portraits, particularly of the ‘Tiatristes’, reflect this racial consciousness.
RH: Alex, the trope of a ‘race mind’ sounds strange coming from you, given your publicly stated and marvellously practised openness to diversity. Although Jung never intended it that way, this term can sound dangerously fascist and ethnocentric. Shifts in world politics as well as intellectual history after 1945 have ensured that we now regard anything said to be founded in ‘race’ with wariness and scepticism. Do you think ‘regional’ might be a more valid description than ‘racial’?
AF: Ranjit, my reference to the ‘race mind’ and ‘racial consciousness’ may not be politically correct, as you point out it. I agree that Jung never intended it that way. He realised the reality of psyche and thought the mythic archetype contained in the psyche had autonomy, an agency beyond the individual. He proposed that the archetype had a dual nature – it exists both in the psyche and in the world at large. This is what Jung meant when he introduced the notion of a race mind, and proposed the archetypes of a racial consciousness.
Now, with reference to the ‘archetypal figures’ in the ‘Tiatristes’ portrait series. An ‘archetype’ is something we all experience and know intimately from the inside. Indefinable, an archetype is like a psychological instinct or informational field of influence which patterns our psyche, our experience of the world around us and how we experience ourselves. Archetypes are the image-making factor in the psyche, informing and giving shape to the images in our mind and the dreams of our soul, and as such, they insist on being approached imaginatively.
RH: So you draw on reservoirs or receptacles of memory. What sort of mental or physical archives or iconographies or narratives do you work with?
AF: Somewhere in the Goan psyche, we have archetypal figures of who we were as a race, a culture, and this is where we draw from to express our fantasy. We even recognise fictional characters as entities whose behaviour we might predict, with whom we may sympathise. What makes the character of Ganesha recognisable to worshippers as a god, for instance? Ironically, archetypes are not learned. They are inborn tendencies to experience the world. Strictly speaking, archetypal figures such as the Bhatkar, the Sasumai, the fisherwoman and so on are not archetypes, but archetypal images that have crystallised out of the archetypes. The images are objective, but universal.
My portraits of the ‘Tiatristes’ in their exaggerated stage garb, along with the viewer’s involvement, create a readily identifiable fantasy. This imagery, I believe, comes from a universal memory.
Strangely enough the great Goan cartoonist, Mario de Miranda, in his drawings of Goans has archetypal images of Goans that are almost identical with my ‘Tiatristes’ portraits. The archetypes had synchronically manifested themselves in Tiatre, in Mario’s work, and in my portraits. Such synchronicities are from a universal memory.
RH: Your ‘Tiatristes’ and ‘Goan Musicians’ portrait series encode and preserve a lively account of a specific subculture. Clearly childhood memory and subcultural knowledge play a major role in your imaginative process.
AF: As a second-generation Roman Catholic Goan born in Dhobi Talao, South Bombay, I had spent all of my adult life being disassociated from mainstream Goan culture. I spoke Konkani only with my grandmother, and English was the primary language of conversation at home and elsewhere. The cosmopolitan life in Bombay exposed me to various influences and I was never really a ‘Tiatre’ fan. But living in Dhobi Talao, one would often bump into famous ‘Tiatristes’, since most of them lived in close proximity to Sonapur Church and were a common spectacle after Sunday mass.
Dhobi Talao has been described by many as the “Goan enclave of Bombay” with its ‘kudds’ or clubs for Goan seamen in transit, and for Goan restaurants that served authentic Goan pork and beef dishes, and the joints run by ‘Aunties’ during the Prohibition period. It was a natural hangout for famous Goan musicians like Chris Perry, who lived close by in Dabul, Chic Chocolate, Micky Correa, and others. I remember seeing the great Mario Miranda with his friend the late ‘Busybee’ (Behram Contractor), sipping chai with their snacks at Kayani’s.
Western music in India was pioneered by Goans. My fondest memories of Goan musicians were at the Bistro café at Flora Fountain, where my father would often take us to see performances by jazz quartets made up of Goan trumpeters, double bass players, a pianist and a vocalist. In my later youth, Rang Bhavan near St Xavier’s College was the place to go to for open-air jazz and rock performances.
In the early 1970s in Bombay, I saw the first ‘hippies’ in Colaba near Hotel Stiffles and the surrounding areas. I thought their unconventional lifestyles were “really cool”, so to say. Later, this fad was reflected in the ideologies and lifestyle of my days at Elphinstone College in Bombay.
RH: We make discoveries all the time! So you were my senior at Elphinstone. And you were there in that golden decade when the campus of this elite college was divided between the tripping-out, cloud-head culture people and the class-warfare theoreticians and hunger-striking activists of the far Left?
AF: I loved every moment of those years at Elphinstone, the college canteen being the most frequented place.
RH: It was, for some students, like a Goa beach in the middle of Bombay’s colonial quarter!
AF: Speaking of Goa beaches, it was by no accident that my early ‘unsupervised’ vacations in Goa took me straight to the North Goa beaches and the beach parties. It was like being ‘Alex in Wonderland’! I still remember the trance parties at ‘Disco Valley’ in Vagator in the early 1990s with people like 'Goa Gil' playing his very special Goa psychedelic music. Dreadlocked Goa freaks adorned with tattoos, body piercings and freaky party costumes kicked up huge clouds of red dust whilst dancing to that psychedelic Goa trance music. Most of my work in Goa relies on these memories as a link to the ‘Goan race mind’.
RH: Alex, what a fantastic account! You should write a memoir. But again, you speak of a ‘Goan race mind’ but actually describe and celebrate an incredibly confluential gathering of diverse people of various cultural, religious, social and continental origins, all coming together in a new and redemptive fusion through cultural expression.
AF: ‘Goan psyche’ would be a more appropriate term. I agree, ‘race mind’ definitely implies jackboots, swastikas and Sieg Heils. I am definitely one who celebrates the confluential gatherings of diverse peoples.
RH: In what does the importance of memory reside, in your view? And could there sometimes also be a negative, sinister or debilitating aspect to memory?
AF: Memory is what gives us our character, and our various personalities, however diverse we may be. We inherit this first as genetic information from our parents and ancestors and then by observing traditions, rituals and everyday life patterns. Memory creates close tribal bonds via information that is passed on from one generation to the next generation, along with newly modified patterns of information of that current generation.
Cultural hegemony and intolerance for others would be a negative aspect of the ‘race mind’ or ‘racial consciousness’, if left unchecked. To forget that we are all ultimately connected even though we are diverse would be a negative aspect.
RH: Meaning, it would be negative if we got stuck in a specific ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’ or other kind of exclusivist memory and forgot the larger, more capacious, universal and unifying ‘species memory’?
AF: That is exactly how I see it. You see, we humans evolved in Africa about 150,000 years ago. From there to this point in time we have seen genetic and cultural diversity and the rise and fall of many civilisations. I don’t think evolution as a process will stop with our generation. I honestly think that to get stuck with ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’ memories while missing out on the ‘species memory’ is not very wise.
RH: Does the prospect of the loss of memory, both at the level of the individual mind and that of a civilisational corpus, terrify you? Do you think memory can oscillate between active and latent states, become dormant and be translated, reactivated, retrieved afresh years or centuries later?
AF: The genetic information inside the cell that propagates evolution is never a result of random accidents, or as Darwin suggests, that information came from natural selection rather by an intelligent design. If we go by Darwin’s theory of natural selection (use it or lose it theory), he suggests that organisms lost memory of genetic information as they evolved into different species. The theory of natural selection would reduce the amount of genetic information that is carefully stored in each strand of DNA. It is DNA that determines the nature of the physical being and contains the inherited memory of all generations. As we now know, DNA doesn’t dump information, but merely transforms these instructions into various organisms at an appropriate time by turning on and off various combinations of amino acids based on an intelligent design.
RH: Can you conceive of a world structured on the principle of amnesia?
AF: It would be highly unlikely, as this memory is recorded at a genetic level in the DNA for every generation of every living species. In the unlikely event that such a catastrophe takes place, at the most intimate level you would find a loss of family bonds, and from this would follow the feeling of disassociation from each other as a species.
The beautiful fractal diversity of genes that gives us various traditions and cultures would vanish into a bland world, a world without the love, emotions and thoughts that make us what we are – human.
Also see Tiatriste and Jungian Archetype
Lens-ing It
Ranjit Hoskote: Alex, let’s go back to the beginning of our project. ‘Retrieval Systems’ evolved from my interest in memory as a condition, a resource, an archive or reserve of impulses, enigmas, images, complexes and patterns that all human beings, and certainly artists, draw upon constantly. What role does memory play in your art?
Alex Fernandes: One’s memory is what creates the ‘race mind’ and ‘racial consciousness’, as Jung puts it. The Goan portraits, particularly of the ‘Tiatristes’, reflect this racial consciousness.
RH: Alex, the trope of a ‘race mind’ sounds strange coming from you, given your publicly stated and marvellously practised openness to diversity. Although Jung never intended it that way, this term can sound dangerously fascist and ethnocentric. Shifts in world politics as well as intellectual history after 1945 have ensured that we now regard anything said to be founded in ‘race’ with wariness and scepticism. Do you think ‘regional’ might be a more valid description than ‘racial’?
AF: Ranjit, my reference to the ‘race mind’ and ‘racial consciousness’ may not be politically correct, as you point out it. I agree that Jung never intended it that way. He realised the reality of psyche and thought the mythic archetype contained in the psyche had autonomy, an agency beyond the individual. He proposed that the archetype had a dual nature – it exists both in the psyche and in the world at large. This is what Jung meant when he introduced the notion of a race mind, and proposed the archetypes of a racial consciousness.
Now, with reference to the ‘archetypal figures’ in the ‘Tiatristes’ portrait series. An ‘archetype’ is something we all experience and know intimately from the inside. Indefinable, an archetype is like a psychological instinct or informational field of influence which patterns our psyche, our experience of the world around us and how we experience ourselves. Archetypes are the image-making factor in the psyche, informing and giving shape to the images in our mind and the dreams of our soul, and as such, they insist on being approached imaginatively.
RH: So you draw on reservoirs or receptacles of memory. What sort of mental or physical archives or iconographies or narratives do you work with?
AF: Somewhere in the Goan psyche, we have archetypal figures of who we were as a race, a culture, and this is where we draw from to express our fantasy. We even recognise fictional characters as entities whose behaviour we might predict, with whom we may sympathise. What makes the character of Ganesha recognisable to worshippers as a god, for instance? Ironically, archetypes are not learned. They are inborn tendencies to experience the world. Strictly speaking, archetypal figures such as the Bhatkar, the Sasumai, the fisherwoman and so on are not archetypes, but archetypal images that have crystallised out of the archetypes. The images are objective, but universal.
My portraits of the ‘Tiatristes’ in their exaggerated stage garb, along with the viewer’s involvement, create a readily identifiable fantasy. This imagery, I believe, comes from a universal memory.
Strangely enough the great Goan cartoonist, Mario de Miranda, in his drawings of Goans has archetypal images of Goans that are almost identical with my ‘Tiatristes’ portraits. The archetypes had synchronically manifested themselves in Tiatre, in Mario’s work, and in my portraits. Such synchronicities are from a universal memory.
RH: Your ‘Tiatristes’ and ‘Goan Musicians’ portrait series encode and preserve a lively account of a specific subculture. Clearly childhood memory and subcultural knowledge play a major role in your imaginative process.
AF: As a second-generation Roman Catholic Goan born in Dhobi Talao, South Bombay, I had spent all of my adult life being disassociated from mainstream Goan culture. I spoke Konkani only with my grandmother, and English was the primary language of conversation at home and elsewhere. The cosmopolitan life in Bombay exposed me to various influences and I was never really a ‘Tiatre’ fan. But living in Dhobi Talao, one would often bump into famous ‘Tiatristes’, since most of them lived in close proximity to Sonapur Church and were a common spectacle after Sunday mass.
Dhobi Talao has been described by many as the “Goan enclave of Bombay” with its ‘kudds’ or clubs for Goan seamen in transit, and for Goan restaurants that served authentic Goan pork and beef dishes, and the joints run by ‘Aunties’ during the Prohibition period. It was a natural hangout for famous Goan musicians like Chris Perry, who lived close by in Dabul, Chic Chocolate, Micky Correa, and others. I remember seeing the great Mario Miranda with his friend the late ‘Busybee’ (Behram Contractor), sipping chai with their snacks at Kayani’s.
Western music in India was pioneered by Goans. My fondest memories of Goan musicians were at the Bistro café at Flora Fountain, where my father would often take us to see performances by jazz quartets made up of Goan trumpeters, double bass players, a pianist and a vocalist. In my later youth, Rang Bhavan near St Xavier’s College was the place to go to for open-air jazz and rock performances.
In the early 1970s in Bombay, I saw the first ‘hippies’ in Colaba near Hotel Stiffles and the surrounding areas. I thought their unconventional lifestyles were “really cool”, so to say. Later, this fad was reflected in the ideologies and lifestyle of my days at Elphinstone College in Bombay.
RH: We make discoveries all the time! So you were my senior at Elphinstone. And you were there in that golden decade when the campus of this elite college was divided between the tripping-out, cloud-head culture people and the class-warfare theoreticians and hunger-striking activists of the far Left?
AF: I loved every moment of those years at Elphinstone, the college canteen being the most frequented place.
RH: It was, for some students, like a Goa beach in the middle of Bombay’s colonial quarter!
AF: Speaking of Goa beaches, it was by no accident that my early ‘unsupervised’ vacations in Goa took me straight to the North Goa beaches and the beach parties. It was like being ‘Alex in Wonderland’! I still remember the trance parties at ‘Disco Valley’ in Vagator in the early 1990s with people like 'Goa Gil' playing his very special Goa psychedelic music. Dreadlocked Goa freaks adorned with tattoos, body piercings and freaky party costumes kicked up huge clouds of red dust whilst dancing to that psychedelic Goa trance music. Most of my work in Goa relies on these memories as a link to the ‘Goan race mind’.
RH: Alex, what a fantastic account! You should write a memoir. But again, you speak of a ‘Goan race mind’ but actually describe and celebrate an incredibly confluential gathering of diverse people of various cultural, religious, social and continental origins, all coming together in a new and redemptive fusion through cultural expression.
AF: ‘Goan psyche’ would be a more appropriate term. I agree, ‘race mind’ definitely implies jackboots, swastikas and Sieg Heils. I am definitely one who celebrates the confluential gatherings of diverse peoples.
RH: In what does the importance of memory reside, in your view? And could there sometimes also be a negative, sinister or debilitating aspect to memory?
AF: Memory is what gives us our character, and our various personalities, however diverse we may be. We inherit this first as genetic information from our parents and ancestors and then by observing traditions, rituals and everyday life patterns. Memory creates close tribal bonds via information that is passed on from one generation to the next generation, along with newly modified patterns of information of that current generation.
Cultural hegemony and intolerance for others would be a negative aspect of the ‘race mind’ or ‘racial consciousness’, if left unchecked. To forget that we are all ultimately connected even though we are diverse would be a negative aspect.
RH: Meaning, it would be negative if we got stuck in a specific ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’ or other kind of exclusivist memory and forgot the larger, more capacious, universal and unifying ‘species memory’?
AF: That is exactly how I see it. You see, we humans evolved in Africa about 150,000 years ago. From there to this point in time we have seen genetic and cultural diversity and the rise and fall of many civilisations. I don’t think evolution as a process will stop with our generation. I honestly think that to get stuck with ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’ memories while missing out on the ‘species memory’ is not very wise.
RH: Does the prospect of the loss of memory, both at the level of the individual mind and that of a civilisational corpus, terrify you? Do you think memory can oscillate between active and latent states, become dormant and be translated, reactivated, retrieved afresh years or centuries later?
AF: The genetic information inside the cell that propagates evolution is never a result of random accidents, or as Darwin suggests, that information came from natural selection rather by an intelligent design. If we go by Darwin’s theory of natural selection (use it or lose it theory), he suggests that organisms lost memory of genetic information as they evolved into different species. The theory of natural selection would reduce the amount of genetic information that is carefully stored in each strand of DNA. It is DNA that determines the nature of the physical being and contains the inherited memory of all generations. As we now know, DNA doesn’t dump information, but merely transforms these instructions into various organisms at an appropriate time by turning on and off various combinations of amino acids based on an intelligent design.
RH: Can you conceive of a world structured on the principle of amnesia?
AF: It would be highly unlikely, as this memory is recorded at a genetic level in the DNA for every generation of every living species. In the unlikely event that such a catastrophe takes place, at the most intimate level you would find a loss of family bonds, and from this would follow the feeling of disassociation from each other as a species.
The beautiful fractal diversity of genes that gives us various traditions and cultures would vanish into a bland world, a world without the love, emotions and thoughts that make us what we are – human.
Also see Tiatriste and Jungian Archetype
Lens-ing It
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