Aaron Sinift, “The Five Year Plan”

June 28, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. As a response to his desire to make a work of art, unique in character and materiality, Aaron Sinift created the Five-Year Plan project. The inspiration came from the artworks printed onto the side of sling bags called “jholas” that are commonly made by Gandhi ashram collectives throughout India. The cloth they are made from, called khadi, is made from hand-spun cotton thread woven on hand-looms, a cloth with deep resonance in India. Sinift commissioned 1.4 kilometers, almost a mile, of khadi from the Manav Seva Sannidhi Ashram in Modinagar, which employs 700 spinners, the majority of whom are women over the age of 55. The ashram also employs 45 weavers, and 35 helpers. Most of these workers are Dalit Muslim or low-caste Hindu, and are the sole providers for their families. The ashrams who created this book made it entirely from khadi cloth featuring screen- and block-printed artworks by 24 artists from 8 countries. He commissioned well-known artists like Francesco Clemente, Yoko Ono, and Chris Martin to contribute one page each. Spinning and weaving the khadi for the Five-Year Plan created more than 2,400 days of work for the ashram and kept 100 families employed for a month.