Wanderlust and an Art Residency in the Valley of Kathmandu

By Mark Bechtel

Contributing artist and writer

August 23rd 2018

Upon arrival at the Tribhuvan International Airport, I enjoyed the ease of entry that only small airports can offer. In a short time, I was in a taxi making small talk with the driver on my way to Nexus Culture Nepal. Like many Nepalis I met, he spoke English well and was excited to share stories about his home city. It was then that I learned that the city in the heart of Kathmandu valley is not just one city but three. I was going to an artist residency in Patan (also known as Lalitpur and Manigal), not Kathmandu.

Per the instructions of the Director of LASANAA, Ashmina Ranjit, I’d asked the cab driver to call her for directions. You see, the place I was going to is located on a road that has no name. The Norwegian Embassy is a short walk down the road and I later found it amusing to look up the government agency and confirm that indeed, they could not list a specific address either.

The next pleasurable confusion I encountered was gaining clarity about where exactly LASANAA was after arriving at NeXus Culture Nepal (NCN). I say pleasurable because I can enjoy being a bit lost in the woods when it presents no peril and time is not important. For the next month, I would live as I please on my own time. NCN is clearly identifiable in a four story multi-terraced building with a café and courtyard. You can find it in Google Maps. LASANAA, the Newari word for art, is the alternative art space that hosts the residency program, exhibitions, artist talks, film screenings, and workshops.

After speaking with Ashmina, I realized that LASANAA exists more as an idea that takes form as needed to stimulate a community and promote contemporary art in a city that has very little of it. I later came to see it as one of her art projects. The non-profit, NCN, is where it happens to take place most of the time. An exhibit by two current artists-in-residence, Gareth Prew, from Wales, and Bibek Thapa, from Kathmandu, filled the building from the café up through a stairwell to the second level.

In February, Ashmina had been recognized by the Kathmandu Post to be among the 25 most influential people that have shaped Nepal during the last 25 years. She accomplished this through performance art at a time when it was very far from being accepted by the local art community as a legitimate art form. She had braved cruel and slanderous attacks, primarily from other artists beholden to tradition, when she first began making work about women and sexuality in an unarguably patriarchal culture. Today she is known and admired to such an extent that strangers once recognized her and intervened to shout down and run off policemen that were harassing her as she was preparing for a performance at a public square.

One powerful example among her series of artworks, in protest against the ongoing violence during the Nepalese Civil War, resulted in nearly every radio station in Kathmandu nationally and simultaneously broadcasting the jarring sound of people wailing and crying. It shook people on all sides and renewed the calling for an end to the violence. The sound recording had been shared with her by a filmmaker friend who had been documenting a village as people learned that their loved ones had been massacred by the army. Nearly 20,000 Nepali people were murdered during this decade-long war between the Maoists and the Monarchist government.

“Friends tried to convince me not to pursue this work out of fear for my safety, but I knew something had to be done”, Ashmina told me. “Some friends that aided in the performance that day flew to India immediately afterward out of fear for repercussions”, and yet Ashmina managed to convince the City Police Commissioner that this artwork must happen. He agreed to provide support through security measures rather than make arrests and break skulls, as the police were known to do. The war concluded in 2006, and despite the turbulence of that recent past, the people and the city have continued to put it behind them. A new constitution was passed in 2015 that affirms the change from a monarchy to a federal democratic republic.

I was provided with a spacious and clean, comfortable and quiet room with its own bathroom. It is here that I spent much of my residency conducting my research primarily through reading, writing, and sketching. I needed few means to later prepare and produce an exhibition at the end of a month-long stay, and there was ample workspace on the terraces and rooms above for this task. It is not the kind of residency that is equipped with tools and shop facilities, but it was what I sought, and I received great warmth and support from Ashmina’s family and the young women that volunteered to support NCN.

The café downstairs attracted a regular mix of local Nepalis, ex-pats from NGO’s and the United Nations, as well as foreign tourists passing through. Good conversations ensued easily among strangers on a daily basis. One day I met a remarkable and fast talking young man from Australia, but of Croatian descent, whose expertise in forestry and farming technology landed him a job at a nearby NGO. He also happened to be a former professional mixed martial arts cage fighter. Another afternoon I met a British engineer who was there to assist in the product development of a high efficiency stove intended to aid poor mountain village and farming communities. The next afternoon I met an American organizer from Burning Man that was working through a non-profit to run hacker workshops that introduced technology to kids. On another occasion I had the great pleasure of meeting a brilliant Nepali professor and museologist. I could list many more.

I sensed something fragile and quite extraordinary about this place. There really was nothing like it in the city, as confirmed by others that lived there. The traveler’s joy in openness to meet others along journeys mixed easily with locals that turned out to express themselves at open mic nights and attend the art shows, in addition to foreign and Nepali artists-in-residence. It was a welcome contrast to the guarded anxiety and competitive pressure common in the New York art scene. Foremost, people wanted to listen to one another here more than promote themselves.

I was raised by parents with passion for the mountains. My summer family vacations were camping road trips from Indiana to the Rockies, which my brother and I loved. Needless to say, staying in a large mountain city at only 4600 feet elevation was not going to satisfy my desire to experience the Himalayas. I’m no cliff climber, but I do love hiking and riding motorcycles. I broadened my residency experience beyond the city by renting the most reliable motorcycle model that I could find, a Honda CRF 250. Lightweight with high clearance and excellent suspension, it was what I needed to safely manage extremely rough road conditions on high mountain roads as well as within the city itself. After great recommendations from friends, I followed the advice of Ashmina’s partner, Basanta, to ride the road to Manang. I was seeking adventure and I most certainly found it.

Regarded as one of the most dangerous roads in the world, my departure was underscored by Ashmina’s son, Aba, lending me his whistle. One of their friends had once fallen down a mountainside and it was his whistle that saved him while stranded with broken limbs. But the adventure started before I left the city.

There is nothing quite like riding in heavy traffic choked with diesel fumes and thick dust, squeezed in between trucks with tires larger than your bike, and feeling quite nervous about it when suddenly some casual cruising baba goes flying past you on a scooter in his polyester dress pants and flip flops, at a clip of around 50 kph and, of course, wearing no helmet while texting on his phone. Yes, that is a true story and that fellow shares company.

I loved every minute of the ride along the winding Prithvi highway toward Bandipur that followed the Trishuli river. Things got really exciting once I started climbing elevation past Besisahar, which also marked the last available petrol pump. I had packed a couple of two-liter Coke bottles as reserve fuel tanks, so I was confident not to run out. You can find plenty of videos online to see what that road is like.

My destination was the Nepali Kitchen Guest House just north of the small mountain village of Jagat. After a thrilling straight 8-hour ride, I walked on shaky legs to the entrance to be greeted by Dilu who burst out laughing so hard at my appearance that she had difficulty saying hello. The periodic belches of thick black exhaust from the buses and Tata trucks along the Prithvi highway had blackened my face and my hair looked like a madman’s once free of the helmet. Laughing makes for such a good introduction.

During the days I rode higher up into the mountains where it was still snowing and then returned in the evenings, which I spent with Dilu and her husband, Pancha, eating simple but delicious Nepali food, like Dal Bhaat and veggie yak cheese momos, sipping cardamom coffee, sharing stories, and taking turns playing Hindi music. My wife is from New Delhi and I have developed a great love for classical Hindi music.

Pancha and Dilu are from a very small village at the top of the mountain adjacent to the tea house. Determined from a young age, Pancha is the only one to manage leaving it by educating himself enough to start his business with his wife. After the great difficulty he’d overcome to accomplish this, he started a preschool in nearby Jagat and now teaches the local children 6 days a week. I was so impressed by what he’d overcome, and grateful when he invited me to hike up the mountain to visit his village. It was a privilege and pleasure to be welcomed so warmly by the people there and interesting to learn how they lived as we walked along the mountainside between the homes. Inside one small shelter a man was smoking freshly caught frogs over a stove. Along the trail leading back down to the road, a small grinding mill was powered by the river stream. Crops were grown along the mountainside as well as on the peak above. Pancha attested to a life that was not easy in the village but stated that it had improved considerably with the increase in tourism following the construction of the road I drove up.

The day before my planned return, a torrential hail storm pounded the mountains as I watched from the comfort of my cabin, but the reputation of that treacherous road was proven to me as a result. I found myself trapped by a fresh landslide following the rain on a road that was carved just enough into the side of the cliff to barely allow the passage of a single four-wheeled vehicle.

Local estimates about the arrival of a backhoe to clear it ranged from six hours to days. Thankfully, I met Ram, a young man among a group of travel guides, that helped me assemble a group of four young men and negotiate a fee.

They helped me carry the motorcycle over the landslide and I was free to return to Kathmandu to finish my exhibition before returning home to Brooklyn.