At Serendipity Arts Festival, an Iconic Goa Barge Finds New Life as a Floating Exhibition

~ Curator Veeranganakumari Solanki turns an industrial barge into a participatory space that listens back.

Goa Khabar:Goa’s iconic ore barges, a quintessential sight in Goa’s rivers silently chugging up and down waterways, ferrying iron ore cargoes, will turn into an unlikely stage for art at the forthcoming 10th edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival (SAF).

A floating exhibition titled Barge will anchor at the Captain of Ports Jetty in Old Goa from December 12 for the entire duration of the festival, converting the familiar industrial vessel, which has been integral to the state’s economy for decades since Goa’s liberation and mechanisation of ore harvesting practices, into a site of sound, space and serving as a host for the unique installation put together by multiple artists.

Curated by Mumbai-based writer and curator Veeranganakumari Solanki, Barge builds on ideas from three earlier SAF projects: Future Landing, which explored speculative environments; Synaesthetic Notations, which examined cross-sensory translation; and A Haptic Score, which focused on touch-based perception. Each of these projects looked at how the body receives and interprets sensory information, a line of inquiry that continues aboard the barge.

In this edition of the festival, the barge’s hollow architecture becomes the starting point. “A barge holds a cavity, a space and an absence for presence to exist. In functional form, these presences may be perceivable matter, or traces of an echo. Either way, it is only through absence that presence comes to be, whether material or abstract. Yet, there is a third aspect: imagination. Imagination, driven by an encounter, emerges from a gap that exists at the threshold of what we do and do not perceive. It invites with it, potentiality,” Solanki said.

Artists on board, namely Prajakta Potnis, Hemant Sreekumar and Julien Segard, respond to this idea of absence and presence through the space of the barge itself, working with its architecture and its sound. Their works explore the edges of a world where, Solanki says, “industry and capital wash away imagination,” guiding viewers to sit with uncertainties rather than reach obvious conclusions.

A key component of the exhibition is the evolving sound work being developed by artist Alan Rego, who taps into the barge’s acoustic behaviour. “He collected sounds from the barge and he’s planning to put a microphone into the water while he’s performing,” the curator said. The microphone will gather noise that is processed in real time. Solanki explained that the artist uses a programme to break the noise into frequencies, then shapes these into patterns that evolve into rhythm and eventually music. For Solanki, this process mirrors the exhibition’s core idea that presence can emerge from absence, rhythm from randomness and meaning from what first appears incoherent.

Solanki, whose curatorial practice explores how creative forms converse across public and private spaces, has previously worked as a Brooks International Research Fellow at Tate Modern, a resident at Delfina Foundation and in leadership roles at Space Studio and The Gujral Foundation. She now co-directs the SqW:Lab Foundation and sits on the advisory committee of the Piramal Photography Gallery at National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai.

Visitors can experience Barge throughout the Festival at the Captain of Ports Jetty in Old Goa. For details visit the Serendipity Art Festival website or app.