Crash !!
[Installation at Roshanara Bagh, New Delhi, December 2008]

A strange consignment has been ‘airdropped’ and its contents have mysteriously vanished. All that is left now is just the mangled tin and wood of this ‘relief supply box’ due to the impact of the crash,... while the parachute’s canopy is entangled on the branches of the tree nearby. One craves to see the source of this absolutely wonderful smell with a deep, woody note that emanates from this crash and engulfs us, one that magically beckoned us this close to the Crash. The insides of the box have been completely coated with sandal oil. So distinct and unmistakable is the smell of sandalwood and its oil that its ethereal notes have captured the imagination of kings, lovers, artists, poets, sages, all and sundry from times immemorial and will continue to do so for generations to come. But only if it survives the great threat of extinction that it faces today as never before.

Sandalwood invokes many contradictions in contemporary India: legal/illegal, protected/threatened, sacred, spiritual and outright commercial. This public art installation aspires to be many things simultaneously: a balm for healing, an aromatherapy for our community whose indifference to the future of this fast disappearing species [among many others] is alarming; a fragrant stimulation that could positively affect the subtle dimensions of the audience; or a cooling process [which is one of its most valued properties] for our heated times that heightens its medical and meditative properties, a celebration of its legendary selflessness, that perfumes even the axe that lays it low.

This installation attempts to draw attention to the disturbing rate at which sandalwood forests are being felled into extinction, through lack of conservation efforts, state apathy and neglect, and the depredations of individuals such as the notorious profiteer/poacher/sandalwood smuggler Veerappan, who from his base in the forests eluded the law for many years until he was finally gunned down by the police.

The project aims to use the strong presence of olfactory stimuli in order to heighten the absence of the actual material itself, laying greater emphasis on the distinct personal experience of each individual’s olfactory reminiscences that can in no other way be documented, except within one’s own self. A memory that will surely resonate with every subsequent encounter with this mesmerizing fragrance. The thrust of this participatory art project is to combine the urgency of the situation [annihilation of a species] with the act of ‘airdropping’ [emergency supply] where one of the most valued, cherished, worshipped, widely used and illegally felled trees is ‘given a chance’ for survival through a symbolic rendering of conservation manifesting itself through the spectacle of a ‘message from the skies’.

   Krishnaraj Chonat.

   This installation was part of 48 Degrees Celsius--.Public.Art.Ecology held in New Delhi.