Social Craft Explanation// We are going to Bangalore

Lets now look closely at Social Craft.

Social Craft is a framework and a method of valuing and studying the
minutia of every day experiences.
Please take out your magnifying glass. While holding it in your left
hand, stick your right index finger through the center of the glass.
Hold it up to your eye to examine this experience.

Through the use of magnifying glasses we can see what we often only look at...
By observing the experiences that we often take for granted, we stand
to learn more of their truth and essence. If we magnify our daily
routines and use them as sources of physical, mental, emotional, and
social learning, education becomes universally available and equal.
Social Craft honors the syllabus of your life. Your life begins at
home.

When I think of how I do what I do, it all goes back to what I saw and learned from
home. I had to clean underneath the table as well as the top of it, and now, not
coincidentally, I find myself looking underneath everything I do. I find my interests
to be in finding and attending to hidden details, shining them up or deciding to leave
them hidden. I don’t think it is a stretch to say that my love of secret details and my
thoroughness has come to be out of a rigorous weekly Saturday house cleaning.

Home is our first curriculum. It is where we learn many of the
systems for navigating life. We think it is the best place to start
to study and to practice social craft. To formalize the home as a
site of learning, we will study its physical structure, its relation
to the body, and its ritual use. Our class will build and use a house.
Its use as a site of learning will make it a home.

The discussion of ‘ home’ in India is complex, and cannot be parsed
without acknowledging the domestic laborers that cohabit with many families. There is
a movement in Bangalore to unionize private household workers, and from afar
this seems to be a cultural phenomenon that is currently being questioned in
the media and the art world. The domestic labor industry extends to
many homes- not just of the rich, but across most social strata from
lower middle class and above, wherein maids, cooks, and caretakers complete the
concept and experience of Indian family life.
In speaking to friends in India, I have learned that these workers are not considered to
be employees nor family members, but rather are seen as an undefined aspect of the
household.
We are interested in understanding the social aspects of the Indian home and
acknowledging the expertise that accrues in the process of developing and keeping it as
a viable enterprise. Not only witnessing, but taking an objective look at domestic labor-
- valuing it as a formative part of human development and education-- will no doubt have
an impact on how participants see their own relationship to home and home workers.

To begin our exploration of home and work, we will hire 4 local experts, versed in
homemaking. They are a real estate agent, a vedic architect, a matriarch, and a
builder. We will hire and compensate them as adjunct faculty through
Srishti, opening up the question of class and academic status. We hope to see their homes
and seek their assistance in building a house, understanding its maintenance
and practices, and finding the art and education inherent in it. We
are working with srishti to devise a method of payment and contracts
that value them as a professor-- offering them the opportunity to
be professionally validated, and paid in a way that legitimizes their work with us to the
government and the institution of srishti, or not.

We will meet with students daily to build a home, devise home
practices and to explode these as valuable learning experiences and
art practices. The radical nature of inserting the home inside a
school campus, as a physical structure and as a method for learning,
is not only poetic but speaks to the historical
synthesis of education from the home and the family.

This home/school will happen through daily classes, where students and
experts become immersed in the design and building of a physical
structure, which will house the class. The daily maintenance of the
house generates a learning environment that encompasses the classes
collective idea of home. This idea will be informed by active
research and documentation of local housing and domestic politics.
We will invite Bangalore to a weekly series of open house events, where members of the
class will perform their research, exhibiting the functions of the home on campus.