Serendipity Arts Festival | Counting Panaji’s historic buildings

Several of Panaji’s heritage structures come alive during the annual Serendipity Arts Festival

This year’s Serendipity Arts Festival (SAF) was significant in showing people who came from outside the State — ‘the outsiders’ — what Panaji is, in its best parts. The multi-disciplinary festival, at 14 locations, across a 5-kilometre area, brought together 1,800 visual and performing artists and artisans from across India and some from abroad, to exhibit, perform, workshop, and talk about their work last month.

The best way to get from one festival location to the other was on foot, taking a few moments to sit on the parapet to look at the Mandovi — the water and the floating casinos. The next best was the shuttle car (with poetry readers in some cars).

The centrepiece of SAF was the Old Government Medical College (GMC). The building came up in the 1920s, says Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar, associate professor at the Goa College of Architecture. Designed by Goan architect Ramachondra Mangesh Adwalpalkar and built by local contractor Madevá Sinai Bobó e Calculó, it “was a product of its time”, drawing inspiration from hospitals being built in British India. The neoclassical structure, constructed using locally available soft red laterite stone, was lime-plastered and predominantly painted yellow. “There was an unwritten rule in Portuguese-ruled Goa that only churches could be fully white,” Khandolkar adds.

The working hospital was shifted out, and in 2007, there were plans to turn it into a shopping mall, “…except for an unlikely activist intervention in the form of Aparanta, an art exhibition curated by Ranjit Hoskote”, reports Goa’s 124-year-old newspaper O Heraldo. Then in 2015, there was talk of the Goa government planning to shift the Goa State Museum into the building, but nothing came of it.

“I remember coming to Goa in 2015 [to plan SAF], crossing it, and saying what a beautiful building it was,” says Smriti Rajgarhia, the director of SAF, and an architect by education. The following year, the Old GMC became a part of the festival’s inaugural edition.

Today, it sees the highest footfalls for SAF. The long verandas open into a series of rooms, and during the recent edition, each exhibited a different artist. On the ground floor was Multiplay, curated by the Gurugram-based artist duo Thukral and Tagra. Next door, at an immersive Indigo Flower installation, visitors wore over-shoes to walk on a canvas of indigo, taking in its herby smell from vats of dye. They footprint their way to a future project — the marks on the canvas forming unintentional designs. “Indigo is immortal,” says textile designer Adheep A.K., who works with Himanshu Shani, of the 11:11 brand of clothes. “Even after 100 years, the pigment can be transferred onto another cloth or garment.” It’s how the exhibit fit into the GMC: both have long lives, and a colonial history.

Adjoining the Old GMC is the Maquinez Palace, which housed a theatre for performances and a series of galleries in December. Originally built in the early 1700s, it belonged to two brothers before being repurposed in 1842 by the government to establish the Escola Médico-Cirúrgica de Goa, Asia’s second-oldest medical school.