Tripura bamboo artefacts find their way to Milan,courtesy NID

Andrea Noronha,Design Associate at NID’s Outreach Department,and Garima Aggarwal,who both graduated from NID,began work on this project about a year ago with the Tripura Bamboo Mission in Katlamaro,a village 40 kms from Agartala.

Garima was unavailable for comments,but Andrea said her designs — three lamps in various shapes and different utilities — were intentionally made labour-intensive in a bid to provide jobs to more people (Eight craftsmen worked on the three lamps for the exhibition).

But the idea was also to showcase an upmarket trend of bamboo over the normal handicraft usually associated with the North East.

Andrea said she took up the project after being inspired by a quote of Ashraf Ghani,an Afghani policy-maker — “Cotton does not compete with opium,but a T-shirt does.” She claims to have printed the quote in the beginning pages of her project report.

Andrea says for meeting with the twin aims,she had to spend at least a month and half prototyping each product. Then she had to train the craftsmen how to make them.

Two of the lamps are of similar designs — bent split-bamboo sticks of various lengths held together by two brass strips. A wire with a bulb can be inserted either vertically or horizontally and the lamp hung from a height. When lit,it looks much like a stylishly arranged bundle of curved spikes with an ambient,hidden glow emanating from the centre. “This one is for ambience more than light. It’s a lifestyle accessory,” Andrea says.

The third lamp is made from a single bamboo pole carved thin in the middle and bent in a wide U. Inside one hollow is placed an LED light,and on the other,a stand is inserted. It is meant as a bedside lamp.

All three lamps are coated with water-based finishing,and have been carved with a dao (a knife/machete unique to the North East). “The process to manufacture these products cannot be entirely mechanised and hence they will still retain a handmade quality. So,it will also remain a craft,” Andrea says.

The I.DoT exhibition will open on March 26 at the Italian Embassy in New Delhi and then move to Milan in June.