Project Gauripur House (PGH) : The Gouripur House was established as the summer residence of the Roy Choudhury of Bangladesh in Kalimpong. It has enormous, tall French windows and doors and charming balconies that overlook the magnificent Kanchenjunga. Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore took at least four extended vacations in this location between April 1938 and September 1940, but also became seriously ill in this location. He never fully recovered from the illness and died on August 7, 1941.
Gouripur House gave us some of Rabindranath's greatest final poems, including Janmadin ('Birthday", which he read aloud from this same home on All India Radio on his 78th birthday (in 1938).
Gouripur House is an abandoned architectural structure. It has thick foliage and broken windows, and the structure is on the verge of collapsing. It was severely damaged during the earthquake on September 18th, 2011.
The Gouripur house is a two-story building with a tin roof and a false ceiling made of wood. It has an elongated wooden staircase, multi-coloured French-style windows with geometric patterns, numerous glass ventilators, and a tin roof. Despite all the amenities, there is no furniture. The rooms and passages of the house tell many stories.
A few of the site-specific artworks have been produced using a contemporary multidisciplinary approach while staying sympathetic to historical events and taking note of the deteriorated remnants of the current home's architecture. The architecture has developed an intimate link with the abandoned structure that goes beyond just its historical significance. Every piece of site-specific art is continuously interacting with this void, and These temporary installations of site-specific art can be seen on the balcony wall, the fireplace in the hall room, and the side of the stairs leading to the second floor of Gouripur House.
An antique mirrored artwork (painting on canvas) was mounted on the center wall of this ancient wooden stairway after I took note of this obvious fact. The reflection of the identical staircase is also shown in this mirror artwork. It appears as though the staircase itself wants to recognise the owner of the worn-in footsteps in each visitor to the home or to catch a glimpse of the imprint that the man's long-ago experiences have left on him. In this mirror's reflection, though, the mark of that emptiness is solidifying with time. Similar to how an archaeologist unearths Egyptian white mummies in a desolate desert, this inanimate house's dead wall is revealed through a few randomly selected rectangular paper frames. This is similar to a finding where the present's deterioration speaks of the past. These blank frames are blending into the home and becoming wall decorations. Constantly seeing their sincere and reciprocal discussion will raise people's awareness of exterior ornamentation and decoration to an intellectual level. Whenever you do a Google search about Gouripur House in Kalimpong, Guru Rabindranath Tagore's 78th birthday in 1938 frequently appears. A modest clay empty vase with the words "জন্মদিন" (Birthday) was placed in Tagore's bedroom on May 17, 2023, to symbolise the reunion of that historical phenomenon with the emptiness of the current Gouripur House through "PROJECT GOURIPUR HOUSE (PGH)."
Another strangely beautiful architectural design of Gouripur House and its practical utility are eye-catching: making multiple square, colourful glass windows to let the daylight come from the wooden ceiling just above the large bedrooms of the house. As a result, even the dark rooms inside during the day created an enchanting scene with beautiful soft coloured light, which even today shrouds Rabindranath Tagore's bedroom in solitude and emptiness. Seeing this dramatic stage of light created inside the room, an actor was needed, and therefore a white, hairy, synthetic fiber cloth abstract protagonist stood in static mode as a metaphor for an unknown story in this empty room. This fictional character is like the only ingestion in this empty room, absorbing the soft light through his whole body.
In the frigid light, the architecture of the vacant Gouripur House occasionally showed a dramatic or intellectual tone, or it seemed like an older storyteller expressing his own viewpoints through this undertaking (PGH). - Ghosh.
We congratulate the enthusiastic artists without whom this project (PGH) would not have been completed: Rajesh Barman, Sudeb Ghosh, Sushanta Paul, and Amit Sutrodhar.
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