This group turns dirty city walls into beautiful street art

Living in Kannagi Nagar is tough. This neatly-laid-out southern suburb in Chennai held immense promise when slum dwellers from all over the city were resettled here through the 2000s. It was the biggest slum resettlement scheme in India.Today, the 1.25 lakh people who live here in 37,149 rundown 250-sq-ft houses face despondence. Getting a job is almost impossible once the employer knows you are from Kannagi Nagar, because more than 150 listed criminals live here and everyone gets tarred by the same broad brush. The area gets flooded with the city’s wastewater. And commuting to work costs a bunch. As a result, some residents are poorer now than a decade ago.So when a band of young artists brought over by the St+art India Foundation descended upon the area a couple of years ago with brushes, spray-cans, and rigs, it evoked curiosity. They came from Delhi, Bengaluru, Goa, Australia, France and Austria. What could this motley crew do to make the residents’ lives better?As the artists kept painting, patterns began to emerge. Some of them were portraits of residents, or the stuff they sold, or words in Tamil. In a few weeks, there were two dozen tall, colourful murals instead of peeling walls. Some of the local residents seemed happy and proud of them.Then word got out. A few Instagram-friendly citizens from the posher parts of the city started visiting to check out the murals. Kannagi Nagar was no longer ‘untouchable’.“Street art has the power to transform a space and the community around it. It can change the dynamics of a place,” says Hanif Kureshi, artistic director and one of the five co-founders of St+art India. Studies from around the world show it instils pride among locals, has a calming effect on the area’s young and restless, and brings in money through tourism.But such lofty ideals didn’t wash with a group of elderly women from Kannagi Nagar, who asked the St+art team one day to give them money instead of wasting it painting their walls.“The simplicity of the question startled us,” says Giulia Ambrogi, another co-founder who worked in Italy’s first contemporary art museum, Maxxi, before making India her second base in 2014. “They are the keepers of the project. If it doesn’t work for them, it wouldn’t work for the city, or for tourism. We must be an amalgamation of voices and it took a while to convince them.” 90146864The start of St+art IndiaThe organised street art movement in India was seeded a decade ago. The first urban art project, called Khirkee Extension, was situated in an urban village in south Delhi where Indians jostled with Afghan medical tourists and African students.Aastha Chauhan, an outreach worker at Khoj Studios, put together a band of artists from across India and the world to paint some walls in the densely packed area. Connections and ideas sparked by the project spread into a loose network.Kureshi, a designer in his dayjob, befriended Arjun Bahl, who came from an event management background. Then came Ambrogi, and Akshat Nauriyal and Thanish Thomas, who had worked in television. In 2014, the five fantasisers decided to organise their dreams under the St+art India Foundation, a registered trust whose name plays on the term street art. The journey since then has taken them to all corners of India. Of the hundreds of murals St+art India has organised over eight years – from Itanagar to Jaipur, and Rishikesh to Kochi – more than 100 are clustered into six art districts.Apart from Kannagi Nagar, they are in Delhi’s Lodhi Colony, Mumbai’s Mahim, Hyderabad’s Maqta, Goa’s Panjim, and Coimbatore’s Ukkadam district. All of them have two dozen or more murals within a walkable distance. In each, the team has worked with the local government and residents to create something agreeable to all.Today they are open-air galleries visited by a wide range of people – from middle-class locals to middle-aged foreign travellers, and from senior government officials and diplomats to young Instagram influencers. medium nocaption90156033 Cheeky art on government wallsSome of their earliest works were spread across Delhi. From a 10-storey portrait of Mahatma Gandhi on the earlier police headquarters at ITO and a 1.5-km wall of poems around Tihar jail in the north, to a common man’s portrait on an abandoned cement factory in Tughlakabad and a three-storey stencil of a kid in Shahpur Jat in the south. Some of them were cheeky, if not outright subversive.The team rethought their goals once they saw the effect of their murals on some local residents. “We saw rapid gentrification in some of the urban villages we worked in. And we felt we had contributed in some way to the image makeover,” says Kureshi. “In Shahpur Jat, they started calling one of the lanes Gora Street because many foreigners would visit to see the works. Prices rose, pushing out some locals. We didn’t want any part in this.”Untitled Carousel 32318699That’s when they chose to work on public housing, or places where the locals couldn’t be easily pushed out. And as street artists who are always on the lookout for good walls, they hit gold in the old government housing settlement in Lodhi Colony.With its neat grid of sleepy roads, wide symmetric walls, and pavements on both sides, it was perfect for hosting a series of murals within a walkable precinct. They took permission from the municipality and started in 2015. But with the second mural they hit a wall – it belonged to another ministry.The team petitioned central government officers for a year. Then they met Praveen Prakash, a dynamic IAS officer heading the Swachh Bharat Mission at the time who agreed to support them. medium nocaption90156075“Something in us changed. We would see this bureaucrat working till 11 pm and leaving with a trolley full of files. We told ourselves we can’t be as subversive as we were – it would be like stabbing such people in the back,” says Kureshi. The murals became less politically motivated and more locally engaging.That didn’t get them all square with some of the locals. When sex workers were portrayed on a wall, it led to a tense days-long standoff. Another resident was adamant that they should only paint images of gods. A kid requested a picture of Chhota Bheem.The idea now is to keep adding to the districts. Lodhi Colony now has more than 65 murals painted by a wide range of artistes, including Osheen from Goa, Inkbrushnme from Pune, Borondo from Spain, and Lek & Sowat from France. Ukkadam in Coimbatore, close to the city’s biggest bus stand and fish market, has had two coats of paint in different stretches. The second phase at Kannagi is on right now. medium90147033The team is acutely aware of the transient nature of street art. An elaborate artwork can vanish overnight if someone plasters it with fresh paint or bills. But while the murals are there, the hope is that they would bring some brightness to the lives of those living near them. medium90201382Videos: Ramesh Sable, Pradeep Nagarkoti