Fascinated by Fort Kochi

The old world charm of Pepper House sets the right mood. As a precursor to her artistic interactions and explorations, Anja Kempe starts off her routine in the nearby hotel with a refreshing one-and-a-half hour yoga practice followed by a little bit of serious talk with her computer. By the time she moves into this heavenly place on earth, it is afternoon on most days. The Dresden-based artist is on her month-long work-cum-visit to Fort Kochi as part of the Pepper House Residency programme.

Settling into a face-to-face table in the cafeteria, Anja’s cat-eyed face refuses to focus anywhere as she speaks. “This is some kind of a meeting place. The summer camp is going on, the Biennale people come in. There are visitors to the studio.”

Anja, a typically shy girl takes advantage in these little-big luxuries of life. She is on a learning phase, understanding Fort Kochi, its people and milieu before taking the plunge in the spacious studio. “Perhaps, I may tie a hammock across a soccer field and take a video or photograph of it. Would people find it fun or irritating?” she asks. But somehow bamboos caught her fancy in between. “I think I would like to find out more about bamboos and develop an installation with this material. It’s not common in Germany and it seems to be a very malfunctioning material,” she says.

Her body of work revolves around the exploration of the unknown of physical space and the potential of movement. This aside, back in Dresden, Anja is part and parcel of an artistic movement to build a new cultural venue to replenish art. She handles this in addition to her job as lecturer in the Department of Media Arts at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig. “Dresden holds very little space for artists. Rents are shooting up. So it’s important to get an affordable space.

Shelling out money from our own pockets and with the contribution from the city of Dresden, we, a 40-member artists’ collective bought a 7,000 sq.mtr 100-year-old factory,” she says, hoping this could make a change in artists spilling out to Berlin for better pastures. Anja will catch a flight back home to Dresden in June.