A graffiti writer from Berlin was recently in Dhaka, the capital of one of the poorest countries in the world, Bangladesh. There he came up with the idea of the ambitious art project PAINTING DHAKA, which is explained in detail in the following video and if you are interested, you can help here.
Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries on earth and its capital, Dhaka, is a monster; it’s a fitful and restless machine, an inhospitable place, and home to twenty million humans who live in the city and will one day die here. Almost half of them live in illegal settlements in the simplest huts made of various materials, corrugated tin, and garbage. A mosaic of existences, fates, and survival. No tourists will find their path there. Here there are only humans who live and work right in this place, working for a pittance so that the rest of the world can wear new clothes and shoes with a clean conscience.
The price for this is paid by others, by people I have met in Dhaka on my journey here. These are people who quickly let me participate in their lives even thought we did not know one another a few minutes ago. There are families with children who laugh, play, and go to school. Here I met Babul Aminul Hoq, the director of a small slum school that is an island in the middle of those huts covered with flimsy fabric and tin. He proudly shows me around the place he built here, a place for the future which offers education and knowledge, a place where poverty does not matter. Everybody is welcome here, anyone can learn here. Attending the school does not cost the children anything and it provides, beyond instruction, also a warm meal, clothes, school materials and medical care right next door in treatment rooms. Unfortunately, those rooms have been empty for a while because the sponsors have gone. The support for the school itself will cease in 2020. It costs 12 US dollars a month to provide one child with education, food, and clothing, Babul tells me. The future of the school is uncertain, and that of the children even more so.
The school building is located only a few yards from the train tracks. Every few minutes a train rushes by. Even closer to the tracks are the people’s huts which vibrate and threaten to collapse. The settlement has grown right up to the tracks; every inch of ground has been built on and occupied. There is no plan or housing administration that would prescribe minimum distances between huts or regulates security or determines the width of paths.
Life in the city of Dhaka is overwhelmingly different from life in Berlin, but they have one thing in common: the resounding of trains. This reminds me of the sound of the trains when I, at the age of 14, started spraying them with graffiti. At that time I realized that I can achieve with a spray can what is so difficult to achieve in real life at that age: recognition, self-confidence, and a loud “hello, I am here” which shortly after travels through the entire town and shows everyone that I exist.
If there is one thing I have so far learned in my life and my travels it is that graffiti works everywhere. But, is that true for Dhaka? Does this kind of art work in a country where people live just to survive? Would creating graffiti bring about self-confidence in a place where happiness often means just having one warm meal a day? Starting in the middle of October, I will teach at this school. For two months I will exchange the regular, orderly life of Berlin for the 20-million city of Dhaka in order to make graffiti with the kids. The canvas will be the trains — wagons that rush by every day just a few meters from the school, both life threateningly close yet instrumental as a transit vein through the city. The students and I will develop the concepts together, right there, concepts where each students paints and sprays one wagon. With permission of BangladeshRailway these wagons will then travel through Dhaka starting in November and will carry the kids’ self-expression through the metropolis. Children will turn into artists who create a more colourful world for themselves and their community and at the same time strengen their self-confidence.
