first half.

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In Nous ne notons pas les fleurs, I started with a bed of mixed flowers.
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I have previously made a draft image that showed the shape of India and its 28 states arranged with the four colours of the flowers that I have chosen – orange Marigold, yellow Marigold, red Hibiscus and white Tuberose.
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Looking at this draft image on my laptop from a distance, I then arranged the flowers, separating the colours to form the 28 states of India.
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I picked the flowers from around where I was sitting in the bed of flowers, taking the colours I want, collecting them in an area, and picking out the unwanted colours from one area at a time. A few times I took some flowers from my spare baskets of flowers outside of the site.

It took me about 9 hours, in total, to do this.

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Why arrange the flowers so painstakingly only to have them mixed again? This whole meticulous process is recorded in time-lapse with a video camera above the site.
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Due to logistics reasons I started at midday before the Open Day, and had to work through until the light was not suitable anymore for recording.
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I had to continue early morning the next day. The colour of the light changes, as well as the freshness and the colours of the flowers.
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The flowers were quite fragrant; the smell filled the whole building. The pollen as well, I guess – Sharmilla had an allergic reaction to it … even when she liked the work. Luckily, out of so many people, she was the only one with pollen allergy.
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I edited the time-lapse video to be shown on the Open Day, to explain the process to the audience. The video was shown from my laptop.
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On the Open Day, when people started coming, I asked them to trace their route of movements, including migration, by taking some flowers from one state and moving it to the others. They had to part the flowers with bare feet to approach the states.

Some people had quite an impressive list of cities they have lived in. These people had to go around the site to trace their route, taking a handful of flowers from the state where they were born, putting it in the second state, taking flowers from this second state and putting them in the third state, and so on.

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This image courtesy of Akshay Rathore.
These images in this posting are only half of the work – at the end of the day almost all the borders were reshaped and the flowers were again mixed between the states. More images in my next post.

Stills are taken from video of Nous ne notons pas les fleurs by Tintin Wulia. Photos courtesy of Sister Suma from Taru Mitra, Patna, India except otherwise noted.