Serendipity Arts Festival 10th Edition, Goa
Infinite Drape explores the endless possibilities of sari draping in India. Ephemeral yet corporeal, these forms live briefly before returning to the cloth’s original state—only to begin again.
Draping is both an everyday practice and a formal craft—an embodied technique honed through repetition, adaptation, and intuition. Imagine the first person to knot or tuck the sari in a new way, setting in motion a chain of adaptation across generations. Spanning time, is a knowledge system at once intangible and material, rooted in lived experience yet continuously open to change.
Conversations around the sari often centre on its textile integrity as complex objects of craft, design, or expression. The practice of draping is often overlooked; each drape is more than a style: it is a story shaped by identity, geography, culture, caste, history, function, beauty, and desire. Over 100 styles have been documented, a diversity further enriched by other draped garments such as the dhoti, odhani, pagri, and shawls, which continue to sustain this sartorial tradition.
At the heart of this exhibition is The Sari Series, a digital anthology created by Border&Fall in conversation with the saris of Raw Mango, a design house rooted in India’s textile traditions, aesthetics, and artisanal craft. Addressing the sari’s past, present, and future, the series documents eighty-four regional drapes through short videos based on Rta Kapur Chishti’s book Saris of India: Tradition and Beyond. Both The Sari Series and Raw Mango are reshaping the sari’s visual and cultural presence, through online media, evocative imagery, and new design vocabularies. They have contributed to a perceptible shift in how the sari is seen and worn, articulating draping as both personal and collective language.
Infinite Drape highlights sixteen videos and proposes new styles of wearing. The exhibition also invites viewers to The Drapery, a space dedicated to crafting one’s own sari drapes.