When the Children Ask
Opening Address for The Uninvited
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When the Goan children of the future ask, what did you do when everything around you changed so dramatically as to be completely unrecognizable? When paddy fields, hillocks, and beaches as you once knew them were built over, overcrowded, and polluted, what did you do? When you began to notice that the culture of your homeland was not the same as you remembered it from your childhood or that the only thing people from elsewhere seemed to know about your native land was that it was infamous for its parties, what did you do?
When the Goan children of the future ask, what happened to our land, what did you do to protect it for us, what will you say?
When the Goan children of the future ask about why children like them were being killed in Gaza for no reason other than that they were Palestinian, how will you reply?
I hope that what we will respond with is some chronicle of resistance, some sign that we took notice of the changes around us and that we said and did something. I look to Angela Ferrão’s art for that expression of resistance, her drawings a record of voices from the villages, city streets, and ordinary Goan folk dissenting against the erosion of their rights, their culture, their way of life and the common cause we have with other people in other parts of the world who face marginalization in their own homelands.
The voices that we hear in Angela’s work may be uninvited, undesired even, but Angela shows us that those voices cannot be silenced.
When the Goan children of the future ask, what did you do, let them see in the work of our artists that we did not, and have not, given up on protecting Goa, our home.
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The
Uninvited: Art by Angela Ferrão
Exhibition Note
How does it feel to be a disempowered observer of changes in your own homeland?
Since the Indian annexation of Goa in 1961, tourism has become an economic mainstay, an industry that has had a large cultural and environmental effect on the small coastal region. “The Uninvited” simultaneously refers to those who come to Goa with no concern for local life, while also denoting Goan people themselves who increasingly feel like they are being edged out of decision-making processes that affect them and their home.
The Uninvited is Angela Ferrão’s first solo exhibition, one that follows a long career of artistic engagement with political events globally and with particular attention to her homeland, Goa. Her digitally created and hand-drawn cartoons convey satirical observations about everything from how her own village of Siolim has been dealing with issues like second home ownership to the ongoing Palestinian resistance. Her pieces have appeared in local Goan newspapers, on social media, and in international academic publications.
In this exhibition, the artist not only bears witness to the lives and struggles of ordinary Goan people and changes to Goa’s environment because of development and tourism, but also acts of resistance by local activists and communities. The show is accompanied by The Uninvited Host: Goa and the Parties not Meantfor its People, a comic book illustrated by the artist, designed by Vanessa de Sa, and with text by curator R. Benedito Ferrão. With these works, Angela Ferrão extends an invitation to viewers to see Goa through the eyes of its people and their concerns for their beloved home.
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Credits: Art by Angela Ferrão, layout by Vanessa de Sa, poster design by Fernando Velho, and project management by Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar. Thanks, too, to the management and staff at Gallery Gitanjali.
