Art
This travel experiment takes creators on a road trip of collaborations
The Road Trip Experience Project brings photographers, artists, musicians, filmmakers and writers together on a collaborative journey.
What happens when you put a musician, a filmmaker, an artist and a storyteller in an SUV and send them to the Himalayas? Jay Ahya pondered this question in 2014.
Earlier that year, he attended the first edition of The Coalition (TC), a creative conference in Delhi. It all started at TC. “I was meeting all these interesting people and decided to make a small video called Humans of Coalition. And during this, this guy told me about something called Kalachakra that was happening in July. It is a Buddhist ceremony that symbolises the revolution of the wheel of time and only happens once in 12 years. I really wanted to go on a road trip to Ladakh because it was the ‘in thing’ to do at that time. So, I just invited a bunch of people I met at TC, and that was it. That was the idea,” he says.
After TC and his road trip to Ladakh, Jay found himself extremely taken with the idea of collaborations over travel. And while he still had a full-time job as a product designer at Letsventure in Bangalore, he spent all of his free time planning this trip. Just a few months later, he had open applications for what would be the first Road Trip Experience Project (RTX). By August of 2014, they were on the road.
RTX is a curated road trip for creators and artists. Every year a few musicians, artists, designers, filmmakers, writers and photographers are chosen to take a trip together and work with each other on art and community projects. In the past, they’ve taken trips to Lahaul and Spiti, Sri Lanka, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Assam and Vietnam.
Shooting Angampora in Sri Lanka
© Dhruv Sethi
The emphasis on these road trips has always been on stories, creating them and sharing them. “Some of the best conversations happen when you're in a car with five strangers who don’t know anything about you,” he says.
Although the road trip and the idea of collaboration is what is fueling this project, the goal is to make a difference in the community. Every trip involves a couple of projects with the local community there. Usually in the form of an art project (like a mural), a sound project (with local musicians), a photography project, an installation project and an impact project. “The impact project is something that happens on the ground with the local community. For example, in Sri Lanka, we worked with an old couple who ran one of the most popular breweries on the beach in the southern part of the country. But it was washed away in the 2004 tsunami. They lost everything including their huge ancestral house that was on the beach,” Jay says. A couple of months later, he went back with 30 people and an idea to create a traveller’s residency for them. “No one was a musician or a photographer then; we were all just working in the garden, painting the house, taking care of the décor. 72 hours later we had created a gorgeous masterpiece. It was very simple, but we made it livable and experiential” he says. “The impact project lets you step out of that ego, whoever you are back home, here you just want to create something.”
The owners of the Santana Guest House in Tangalle
© Farhan Hussain
And this work isn’t limited to the trip itself, many of the participants have been able to make long-lasting collaborative relationships at RTX. Mumbai based singer-songwriter Ronit Sarkar who was part of RTX 3.0 even went on a music tour of Sri Lanka with people he’d met on the trip. Designer Abhishek Chaudhary tells me it helped him find and build a community in the northeast and launch his own comic book with people he met at RTX. Photographer Vibhor Yadav recalls his favourite collaboration with Deepak Ramola, founder of Project Fuel, “He was my roommate during the trip and at the end of the day, I used to show him all the photographs I had taken, and he would pick one and write a poem on that. We named it Woh 12 Din, with 12 “poetographics” from 12 days of the trip. We later presented it at a Literature Festival in Mumbai.”
One of their art projects includes beautifully painted boats at the Dauki river in Meghalaya. “When I first saw these half fish painted on the edge of the boat and I didn’t really understand the concept. That is until the boat goes back into the water and those half fishes become full fishes with the reflection in the water. After that, all the other fisherman wanted us to paint their boats as well!” says Jay. "It was so nice to help the community with our art; we decided to do more of that.”
Singer-Songwriter Ronit Sarkar
© Farhan Hussain
While RTX has been very successful in creating community art projects, planning a trip like this comes with a lot of logistical issues. “We start the process about five months prior, a month of planning, structuring, getting our heads around the location. Two months in, we start the application process, and that goes on for three months and then finally, a month before the trip, we send out the invites,” he says. Since its inception, the applications have grown from 150 to a 1000 and Jay is very careful about the people who get selected to be part of the road trip. Not only do they fill two forms, but they also have a Skype call before they get selected. “It might be childish, but we are mostly looking for a great vibe. The form can give you a good idea about who they are and what they've done, but for journeys like these, it is so important for someone to have the right mindset, the right intention and mostly, a spirit of collaboration,” he says.
Picking the location is one of the biggest decisions. Every place is picked after much thought and deliberations. Once that happens, the first step is laying the foundation of the trip, route maps, transportation, stay and so on. And then comes the communication, curation and experience building. Jay is involved in every single step. "As much as I'd like to delegate, I’m bad at it. So I’m super hands-on with deciding the creative direction of the trip and then getting everyone involved after that. But it starts with me,” he says.
An art project underway
© Riddhi Parekh
This year, RTX is looking to travel to more parts of our own country and will host the next road trip to Odisha. For more information, go to rtxproject.com