Rangeela

Rangeela in Hindi, means colorful. This collection of furniture as art objects is a meditation on decolonizing modernism, through color, thereby combating western chromophobia*.

The forms of this collection are inspired by everyday objects in Indian life.

We chose local materials mindfully, using natural and recycled materials.

Our material exploration also led us to use things that attracted colonizers to India, were used for trade and the eventual enslavement of Indians.

We employed local artisans, and applied their traditional techniques to our forms.

By creating strong social links and valuing craft we helped be patrons to craftizens that have been practising these crafts for several generations. Thereby trying to help keep them alive, in an age of mass production.

*Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge color from culture, to devalue color, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity. More specifically: this purging of color is usually accomplished in one of two ways. In the first, color is made out to be the property of some “foreign body — usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer o the pathological. In the second, color is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential of the cosmetic.

David Bletcher, Chromophobia