Grounds for gathering

ARTIST: SALMAN B BABA || 2026 - ongoing

Waguv is a traditional reed mats woven from local grass found in ponds and lakes in Kashmir. It was a part of everyday life in Kashmir. It was a ground on which people would sit, eat, sleep, converse and assemble. It is light, portable, and temporary. It can be unfolded when needed and folded away when the gathering ends. It was both a material and metaphor. Such value of any material object can be told when it enters the vernacular.

In Kashmiri language, the waguv carries this layered meanings. The phrase “waguv waherawun” (to unfold/spread the reed mat) means to gather people, to call a public into being. Another phrase, “waguv tchatun,” (to cut the reed mat) means to speak ill of others. It refer to the fracture, gossip and slander and undoing of the social fabric. The mat thus holds within it the potentia of both the the possibility of coming together and the risk of disintegration.

Today, the waguv is slowly disappearing from our everyday lives, and so are the possibilities of coming together deemed impossible and difficult in Kashmir. This proposition takes waguv to think about it as a site of gathering. It looks at how people may come together in small, everyday ways, often without formal structure. It also reflects on how such gatherings remain fragile, temporary, and sometimes at risk of being undone.

Conceptual Framework

Building on my ongoing practice around collective formations and informal assemblies in Kashmir, this work proposes ways of gathering under conditions of restriction, surveillance, and precarity. Such conditions allow for gatherings and assemblies that are quite, provisional and held in everyday gestures. My engagement through Yusmarg Collective have made me realise that the acts of coming together may not require permanence, stability or structural coherence rather it may sustain through amorphousness, fluidity, experimentation and responsiveness. The waguv here becomes a conceptual and physical ground for these forms of assembly. It provides a ground for presence and co-existance. Waguv is spread open when needed and folded away only to be unfolded at some other place, at some other time.

The work attends to smaller, transient forms of being-together often invisible and temporary. Its activations happen quietly through shared meals, pauses, conversations, silences and time spent together. It respond to moments and to each other away from urban centers and avoiding the gaze of institutions or authority, open up a creative space that is rooted in trust, kinship, and shared vulnerability.

It asks:

• What happens to a form of gathering when its social and material ground disappears?

• How do new social conditions and material surfaces produce different kinds of social relations?

• What does it mean to replace something that is woven, seasonal, and local with something that is manufactured, permanent, and external?

• When the waguv is no longer spread, what happens to the idea of “waguv waherawun” that is to gather people?

The process will develop episodically in following ways:

Unfolding the Waguv

Across different locations such as homes, orchards, meadows, shrines, public parks and urban edges, reed mats will be placed in different contexts as invitations for people to sit, join, pass by, or leave. The placements will initiate open-ended conversations to discuss the questions stated previously around the shifting conditions of public life and think about the idea of gathering in uncertain and futile conditions that the political geography of Kashmir presents. The conversations can remain unstructured. Shared time allow gestures, and silences to surface without pressure. Workshops around performance art and Bhand theatre will also be included. These would lead to other forms of engagement that emerge from the need to spend more time together, to think through shared concerns, and to extend the ground that the waguv creates.

My pre-ocupation with the students through Yusmarg Collective and IMFA, University of Kashmir will also help me materilaise these prepositions.

Gatherings

Gatherings take form through workshops and walks. These extended moments of being together in workshops can involve drawing within the neighbourhoods paying attention to how memory, architecture, culture and craft practises can allow for more sustained ways of coming together. Walks extend it through movement. The walks will allow encounters with discontinuities collectively and reflect on material shifts, changing textures and fragments of history

Situated Exchanges

Situated exchanges are moments of collective reflection. It will take form through collective readings and film screenings. The materials will prompts for further thought and provocations.

My pre-ocupation with the students through Yusmarg Collective and IMFA, University of Kashmir will also help me materilaise these prepositions. These spaces already carry a history of collective thinking and practice. Each moment of sitting, walking, drawing, reading, or watching becomes a way of being together, even if briefly and carry a possibility for further encounters to emerge.

The outcomes will take the form of partial translations in the form of zines and small texts. It will function as portable objects that can be used for more communal activations.

Significance

The disappearance of the waguv is not only a material shift. Its presence in language and material absence reflects and points to a broader change in how people gather, and share space. Gatherings in Kashmir are increasingly regulated or diminished. Waguv offers a quiet proposition to read these transformations from within the everyday life and carry possibilities of coming together through small acts and shared ground.