An auditory trip through Cubbon Park

The Hindu

30-04-2025

On Sunday, Cubbon Park came alive with a unique new initiative: Sonic Picnics, an interactive textile artwork by Karthika Sakthivel, a Bengaluru-based artist. The piece, created over the last year with recorded interviews, memories, and community engagements in Cubbon Park, invited the public to embark on an auditory trip through the heart of the city, and explore its historical and contemporary narratives, to see what exactly makes the park so special to Bengaluru.
The project, created under the India Foundation For The Arts' Project 560 programme, involved participants sitting on and engaging with a large picnic blanket that, using touch-based audio technology, played the stories, interviews, and personal memories of the people and communities in and around Cubbon Park.
Genesis of idea
The idea came from the artist's work with the British Library, where she realised that people 'don't want just to put on headphones and stare at a wall anymore'. In the spirit of this, when she heard a clip of a woman talking about her mother's warmth and fondness, she had an idea to create a quilt that you could be wrapped in, like the mother's embrace, while hearing the stories of her warmth. She then took her learnings from that and translated them into the piece she has today.
Built as a communal experience, the piece allowed for up to five people to sit together and, with the help of headphones connected to conductive fabric, thread and a microcontroller tucked under the blanket, hear the stories that they chose together. 'I thought of it as a social experiment,' explained Sakthivel. 'I feel like we're always in our own bubble, and suddenly people realise that I'm making a decision and other people are listening to it too, and it was a revelation to them. Even if they were strangers, in a way, the stories bring them together.'
She also talks about the venue chosen to conduct this experiment. 'The reason I chose Cubbon Park is because it's a place where people slow down and feel this connection to each other and nature. We have a large culture of storytelling, but we don't see as much listening, and I'm interested in cultivating that.'
A range of stories
The stories ranged from experiences of celebrating a child's first birthday and going on dates that lasted till the sun rose to the effects of the recent changes in rules banning food and photography in the park. The response from the listeners felt overwhelmingly positive, with one saying, 'This magic carpet takes you from one mythology of the park to another through time and shows us that while fashion and accents have changed, the way the city interacts with the park has stayed the same'
Looking to the future, Sakthivel notes that she's interested in the idea of having additions and chapters to this piece, allowing for it to continue in different forms. 'The great part about fabric is it's very malleable, I've done a quilt, I could do a table cloth, but to me it's not just about the medium, it's about the people and the stories.'