Goethe-Institut brings together an Indian and a German artist to work on murals in Delhi and Chennai

Goethe-Institut in collaboration with St+art India Foundation has brought together an Indian and a German artist to work on murals in Delhi and Chennai in an effort to bring new street art to India, turning city walls into canvas to tell stories of art, travel, and their coming together in public spaces, while also promoting cross-cultural collaboration between India and Germany. As part of the collaboration, Aasthi Miller and Greta von Richthofen have already painted a mural in Delhi’s Lodhi Art District. Chennai is the second destination on the joint trip that Aasthi and Greta are set to embark upon where they will participate in the Kannagi Nagar Festival and paint the second mural.

Aashti, who was born and raised in Mumbai, studied Architecture at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She describes herself as “an architect by day and an illustrator by night.” It was an open call on Instagram prompted her to apply for the project. “Goethe-Institut and St+art India Foundation put out an open call on Instagram to German and Indian artists. That’s how Greta and I came together to work on this project. The design process took us about two weeks. We were both estimating that it would be around 80 hours each of work spread over some time because we kept making small changes and revisions during the course of it,” reveals Aashti whose work is heavily inspired by and explores spaces, places, and faces.

Greta von Richthofen, who studied visual communication in Hamburg and Kassel, has been working as a freelance artist and author since 2019. Her work focuses on documentary narratives and graphic novels. She is particularly interested in projects that allow experiments and take place in collaboration. And that’s what attracted her to the opportunity provided by Goethe-Institut and St+art India Foundation to collaborate with an Indian artist in India. “Both of us started brainstorming and came up with some ideas. We did a few sketches. With the theme revolving around travel we decided not to use cars and planes. The idea was to think creative as creativity is something both of us have in common. So we came up with the theme of traveling through our minds. It may be the most democratic way to travel,” explains Greta.

The Indo-German collaboration is essentially a continuation of Goethe Institut’s initiative titled Graphic Travelogues (GT), which focuses on the depiction of travels in comics and graphic novels. Since 2019, Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi has been working with artists from across the globe to create a digital platform dedicated to comics, focusing on the subject of travel and its evolution during the pandemic. A curated walking tour in Lodhi Art District in Delhi was also organized as part of the mural launch. The launch of the project is accompanied by an engaging social media campaign and an immersive website that documents different aspects of mural making.