Apparently, my grandmother has kept her wedding sari tucked away in a chest at the foot of her bed for most of my life. One sleepy morning, she plucked it from a sea of fabric and gently set it on her carpeted floor, deciding that it was time to sift through her hidden collection of sumptuous silken saris and give them their regular aeration. I gawked at the faded sari, a legendary familial artifact of sorts that I’d only seen in photographs since childhood. She shrugged and continued pulling garments from the chest. The shimmering threads basked in the sun and breathed for the first time in months as each stitch unraveled a flood of memories; Ba knew exactly when and where she’d worn all of them. Every sari had a story to tell.
It would be too easy to spin a metaphor of woven heritage out of this anecdote. I can’t stomach it today, when social media is already flooded with hollow metaphors ringing with residual nationalism and overdue outrage on the one hand, mixed in with genuinely revolutionary affirmations and poetry for the fight ahead on the other. My pessimism is in a tug-of-war with my patience.
Instead, I’m transporting myself back to an afternoon in May when I trekked to Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens. Much like today, it was unseasonably warm and I was in a terrible mood and nothing could fix it. But as I wandered down a path through the little haven of plant life, art, and solitude looking over the East River, gently swaying hives of orange, blue, and gold cloth winked through the tree boughs, making it impossible to worry about anything else.
The works were part of a series of soft sculptures titled phala (2023), named for the word for “fruit” in Hindi/Urdu and other Indo-Aryan languages in South Asia. I’d long admired Indo-Guyanese artist Suchitra Mattai, whose otherworldly weavings, embroidery, and mixed-media art live rent-free in my head. I’d even spent time with her pieces in a gallery once or twice. But the techniques and ethos at the center of her practice struck me with full force in We are nomads, we are dreamers, her first public art installation. Traveling further down the path, I arrived at the exhibition’s main feature: a circle of what the artist calls “monuments to transformation.”
“So many monuments memorialize heroes, heroines, people in power,” Mattai told me in an interview in June. “And so I thought to myself, how can I create a monument to that sense of transformation that you feel every time you move from one place to another?”
Change, evolution, and cyclicality are quite literally built into the sculptures themselves, which Mattai said she wanted to both organically sprout from the ground and land as glacial artifacts flown in from the future. Fashioned from used saris that the artist sourced from India and New Jersey, the woven patterns affixed to a metal armature sloped downward toward the circle’s center, as if forming strange spokes in an unseen wheel. The fabric had already begun to fray during my visit, but that sense of weathering was precisely the point: not knowing how the elements, visitors, plants, and non-human life might alter the sculptures during their time in the park. Even the mirror-polished stainless steel topping each sculpture would change each day, creating a unique portrait of the sky above.
More gifts unfolded up close: designs on the fraying saris, which still bore the touch of their makers and previous wearers. Delicate florals, bold geometric designs, and dense multicolored patterns imbued the sculptures with a spirit of comfort and solidity.
Nearby, in a plot titled a nomadic garden, seeds of flowers and medicinal plants native to North America, South America, and South Asia were just beginning to blossom. Bleeding heart and swamp rose mallow from Turtle Island grazed jasmine and bird of paradise, and the turmeric was growing in nicely.
Marisa Prefer, the senior director of Park Operations, planned the garden together with Mattai. Prefer explained the carefully curated group of plants, adding that they wanted to embody the “idea of a healing garden as a balm in terms of migration and what we carry with us.”
Though the exhibition ended its run in August, Mattai’s garden of fabric and flora visualized both the specificity and connectivity of diaspora without sacrificing one for the other. It’s a rare feat in an age of lazy understandings of immigration and siloed self-interest masquerading as universality, particularly for us dominant-caste diasporic South Asians, who are complicit in both the Indian government’s Hindu fascism and in casteism in the United States (see: Dalit journalist Yashica Dutt on Kamala Harris’s Brahmin background). As much as I find platitudes and allegory unconvincing today, I continue to find solace in the memory of encountering Mattai’s gentle sculptural giants, those antidotes to the trappings of hair-raising nationalist monuments, and the cresting waves of saris that comprised them. Ba’s sari could very well have been among them.
