2025/09/01 by Rishika Mukhopadhyay · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Geographies of human-animal interactions #Photography and Visual Culture #Visual Culture and Art Theory
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/14649365.2025.2549700
openalex publication_date 2025/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
The paper examines how collaborative art practices with traditional craft practitioners negotiate distance and intimacy to elevate traditional crafts as heritage practices. Addressing this question contributes to a broader theoretical concern in decolonizing geographies of heritage: how relational inequalities shaped by class, caste and race are reproduced or disrupted in creative re-presentation of the past. Drawing on fieldwork in Chitpur Road, Kolkata (2017–2019), the paper develops three interrelated forms of distancing: temporal, aesthetic and socio-economic, as conceptual tools to theorize heritagisation. It interrogates the reinforcement of colonial categorization between ‘contemporary artists’ and ‘native craftsmen’ through two collaborative art projects. It argues that heritage-making operates as a double-bind: while aspiring to collapse these distances, heritage is produced if the distance between these categories is maintained. This is illustrated when a hand-pulled rickshaw is transformed into a shared heritage object through art’s auratic intervention. Challenging Walter Benjamin’s conceptualization that reproduction diminishes aura, the paper shows that when art mediates everyday objects, aura is produced, not lost – further creating distance. These findings advance debates on the politics of heritage-making and creative geography, revealing how art performs to address inequality by recognizing the ordinary. At the same time, it reinscribes intersubjective and relational distance, estranging what was once intimate.