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It’s what AD India’s founding editor Manju Sara Rajan terms as “southern shyness” that propelled her to curate The Makers’ Trail a second time in Bengaluru in an effort to have the design-forward city assemble under a singular, organized roof to engage in all things design. While the first edition of The Makers’ Trail had 11 collaborators, the second edition has 17, thereby granting access to a larger number of creative entities from among the city’s best-known architects, design studios and brands. The Trail is an opportunity for the city folks to visit design spaces that are usually not open to the public, including numerous home studios.
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Rajan considers herself fortunate as someone who has been allowed inside the studios of individuals who have crafted spaces and brought them to life with their ingenuity by virtue of her profession. Through The Makers' Trail—which she has funded herself this time in order to keep it completely independent and non-ticketed—she has facilitated “in-situ conversations” for design enthusiasts like students, budding designers and homemakers. “There are open-studio tours of the big city studios like Wari Watai, Tania Singh Khosla Design, Khosla and Anand, Oorja, Ollie Lighting, or even Tharangini Studio, which is the city’s oldest wood-block printing studio,” Rajan says.
Architect Bijoy Ramachandran, besides taking the audience through his latest conservation and redesign projects, has also conducted an exposition of the design and architecture of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, by the late B.V. Doshi. “We have a lot of these architect-led tours in very specific sites, like Bijoy also conducted a tour in Sabha, a 150-year-old heritage building that he had renovated. Soumitro Ghosh conducted a tour of the Zanav Home Factory run by Ravi Khemka, which he built almost 10 years ago,” Rajan says.
There are more formats this time round, with private home tours conducted by both the architect and the client to offer a fascinating exchange between the creators and inhabitants of a space, revealing both sides of the process of building a home. This will also be the second time Deepak Srinath, founder and CEO of the handcrafted and design-driven furniture brand Phantom Hands, will host people at their factory. This opportunity is rather unique considering the brand has no retail outlet, and most people do not have access to the factory space.
The event coincides with BLR-Hubba, a city festival offering over 500 free events across 40 venues. This 16-day celebration is hosted in an effort to make concerts accessible to all, showcasing Bengaluru's effervescent music, culinary and creative cultures. This allows The Makers' Trail a certain kind of momentum that it can borrow from the ongoing carnival to widen its reach, which Rajan hopes will carry the event beyond Bengaluru’s borders to other cities in the coming years.
The enthusiastic attendance from a cross-section of people is what has left her motivated to think beyond the box and make design a more accessible conversation in general. The Makers' Trail is a stage for anyone with an interest in functional design to ask questions about the “how” and “why” of things—questions that can help demystify the world around us. “This is for the people who want to understand why there are so many versions of the (Pierre) Jeanneret chair. What is the difference between making something in wood and something in teak? How do you cure wood? You are not going to come in touch with a carpenter, caner, or glassmaker even if you were to get something made because our process of buying has changed, and all of it has moved online,” says Rajan. Therefore, an experience like the one conducted at Phantom Hands opens up avenues to witness a block of wood turn into something completely unrecognisable, almost elevated in its form.
The fact that Rajan found an interested audience to partake in witnessing the processes of a brand as quiet as Phantom Hands in the very first year—a rather rewarding experience—encouraged the curator-writer-editor to scale the magnitude of The Makers' Trail in the second edition.
The Makers’ Trail is running in Bengaluru till 15 December.
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