STUDIO GOPPO
Bolpur, West Bengal – 2015:
The Artist in Residence Program at Studio Goppo was started with the objective to establish a long term engagement with alternative photographic practices. The idea is to not just work with the photographic process or redevelop old forms of photography but to revisit the surroundings for material, find stories of new possibilities, and navigate issues of self, identity, and sustainability.
Studio Goppo was established by artist duo, Arpan and Shreya Mukherjee in 2015 and is located at Bolpur, Shantiniketan. The word ‘Goppo” in bengali means small stories. The space aims to create a melange of small stories, ideas, practices and research, emerging from the world of photography. Stemming from this is its interdisciplinary approach involving fields such as chemistry, traditional craft, history, literature, bookmaking, paper-making, performance, camera-making, and handmade photography. The studio offers to explore, collect and rebuild the history of photography through a contemporary perspective. It also runs a range of workshops and tutorials on historical photographic processes such as wet plate collodion, salt and albumen print, calotype, Kallitype and gum printing.
The residency program runs between two to eight weeks and is open to artists, writers, chemists or other creatives who could use the infrastructure and resources to realise a project. It is a combination of artistic explorations and pedagogical interventions.The resident artist can access a fully equipped common studio to research and explore various facets of historical photographic practices. There is no compulsion to produce any artwork or body of work during this time. The artist interacts with the space, participates in workshops, and conducts experiments that inform her/his ideas and brings new explorations to the table.
In 2019, Danish artist, Nanna Krogh Lauritsen, the studio’s first resident, used her time at the residency to research and experiment on the silver mirroring process.
Text Courtesy : Space118
Image Courtesy : Studio Goppo