The Living and Learning Design Centre in a Kutch village is about dialogue between contemporary designers and traditional artisans and about keeping crafts relevant.
“Why here? Why a design centre of such sophistication in a small village off a highway?” The answer flashes in one’s mind at the same time: “Because that’s the most logical and relevant place for it.” The answer is validated a while later in a conversation with Ami Shroff, the 43year-old project director of the Living and Learning Design Centre (LLDC). She explains: “My mother, Chanda Shroff, was born in a village in Kutch. She has always been inclined towards art and felt she was privileged to be able to move to a city where she could view art in museums. It got her thinking about rural India and how there is no place to view art. Art is so much a part of the lives of people and yet they cannot see the work created by others. So here it is, a museum in the middle of nowhere!”
It truly does seem that way—a modernist piece of architecture looming up just off the Bhuj-Bhachau highway near the village of Ajrakpur in Kutch, Gujarat, the LLDC was inaugurated on January 23. Ami Shroff jokes about its origins saying: “It all started on an A4-sized paper from which the idea grew. Everyone asked me what it was that I wanted. It was tougher to answer that than my school exams. Ba [mother] would say one sentence, and I would write four pages on it and ask her, ‘Is this what we are planning?’, and gradually it took shape.”
This story is from the March 18, 2016 edition of FRONTLINE.
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This story is from the March 18, 2016 edition of FRONTLINE.
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