A R T I S T P R O J E C T
BRICOLAGE WITHIN THE IMPERIAL DIVIDE:
INTRODUCTION TO IFTIKHAR DADI AND
ELIZABETH DADI’S JUGAAD
aamir r. mufti
Each of the prints collected in Jugaad consists of two distinct formal
elements—a realistic image of what appears to be a piece of industrial
machinery, and an abstract geometrical shape that wraps around and
looks like a mathematically reduced lace or web, one of those Möbius
inversions in which a plane is turned inside out in three-dimensional
Raum. These patterns are based on harmonic geometric shapes, Und
their abstract forms also evoke the long European tradition of guilloche
engraving on metal surfaces, according to the artists who crafted these
arresting images, Elizabeth Dadi and Iftikhar Dadi. Guilloche patterns
are often overlaid on bank notes as an imprimatur that guarantees their
authenticity and value. The delicacy, even ephemerality, of these swirl-
ing structures offers a sharp contrast to the heaviness and solidity of the
pieces of machinery. But what exactly is the relation between the physi-
cality and concreteness of the latter and the abstraction and airiness of
the former? Each of the prints also comes numbered (in Indo-Persian
numerals) and is identifi ed as a “plate,” the English word being written
in Urdu (oder, eher, Indo-Persian) Skript. What exactly is the relation of
the textual element to the image itself? Does the text merely point to
the image from the outside, or is it located inside the image’s frame?
Jugaad is a north-Indian word often translated as “hack” or “work-
around,” and it refers to a frugal, nonstandard innovation or solution to
© 2020 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_a_00272
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a problem posed by a standard (Und, by implication, foreign) Technologie.
It is now actually a concept in management theory, a way of talking
about vernacular and makeshift solutions to specific economic or tech-
nological problems, both in the developing world and beyond.1 Claude
Lévi-Strauss once argued that, unlike the modern scientific attitude
toward nature, the “mythical thought” of premodern societies should be
understood as a kind of “intellectual bricolage,” a mode of thinking
about the world that, while clearly less successful than science in the
manipulation and control of nature, could nevertheless “reach brilliant
unforeseen results in the intellectual plane.” Like the bricoleur, a tin-
kerer and jack of all trades, this mode of thought makes do with “what-
ever is at hand” to offer provisional and makeshift answers to the
mysteries of the world.2 In contrast to modern science, among whose
basic procedures is conceptual abstraction, myth as bricolage is, Lévi-
Strauss asserted, “a science of the concrete.” Jugaad, we might say, Ist
bricolage on the “practical” plane itself. It offers vernacular and provi-
sional solutions to technical problems with the aid of objects readily at
Hand, rather than with repertoires acquired tailor-made for a specific
purpose. Abjuring standardization, regulation, and abstraction, jugaad
is thus in a strong sense a science of the concrete.
Was, Dann, does it mean for the artists to assemble these prints
alongside this specific set of associations? They seem to highlight impro-
visation as a basic orientation within and toward contemporary capital-
ism, as well as the play of concreteness and abstraction within it. In
contrast to just a half century ago, much of the world’s manufacturing
now takes place in the countries of the Global South—broadly con-
ceived, the very places once defined by the absence of modern industry.
Frantz Fanon even argued that in the colonies, the manufactured com-
modity embodied the process of colonization.3 In the contemporary,
postcolonial world, commodity production is no longer linked in that
way to the metropolis, but its logic is defined as much by jugaad as by
rationalization. This jugaad economy inhabits vast swaths of urban
landscapes in these formerly colonized nations, spilling out into the
street from a million shopfront workshops. The prints reproduced here
draw our attention to these social and economic worlds. They raise the
fascinating question of the manner in which precapitalist modes of life
1
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The idea actually has a Wikipedia page of its own.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966), 17.
See Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press), 69–98.
3
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exist within and alongside advanced capitalism. Branding, trademarks,
and regimes of intellectual property remain largely vested in the
advanced capitalist world, even as manufacturing has moved to regions
where formal and informal modes of production are mutually imbri-
cated. In the images of the Dadis’ Project, the digitally generated
abstractions seem to hover ethereally above and around the machines
—whose images here are taken from hand-painted shop signs in
Karachi, Lahore, and Mumbai—articulating the uncanny relation of the
digital economy to industrial manufacturing.
Among the compelling questions of our times is whether and to
what extent we now inhabit a fully integrated world. At its core, this is
an economic idea based on the existence of a single world market. In
addition, the SARS-COV-2 pandemic now has raised once again the old
idea of the “microbial unification of the world.”4 But the response to the
pandemic has also exposed the contradictions and conflicts of this sup-
posedly integrated world—globalism versus nationalism, East versus
Westen, rich versus poor, Global North versus Global South. Der
imagina-tive works presented here, which look like pages taken from
some lost catalog of industrial machines written in a South Asian
Sprache, bring our attention to their ghostly digital specters, inviting
us to confront the social and economic fissures of the contemporary
Welt, the relation between the “advanced” and “backward” zones of
global capitalism.
Jugaad
Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi
Pages 56-68
https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_a_00277
4
See Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Un concept: l’unification microbienne du monde (XVIe–
XVIIe siècles),” Revue suisse d’histoire 23, NEIN. 4 (1973): 627–96.
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