PROJECT KUPPAI
Archives • Tamil • Typography • Research • Art
What happens when you sift through piles of old ‘kuppai’ (Tamil for ‘trash’) and find a treasure of handwritten, printed and stamped type on papers of all colours and textures? When Amma and Uncle bring home bags-full of documents, stashed away amidst countless bills and tickets in my grandfather’s desk, and shred everything they deem unimportant, I sit with them and retrieve as much as I can. This marked the beginning of a collaborative curatorial project with my cousin Srimathi, documenting and investigating these torn scraps as artefacts accrued by my grandparents: fading memoirs of family history, with both emotional and discursive value. I also presented Project Kuppai at two international conferences, where it was well received by the type community.
TIMELINE
December 2021 - present
ROLE
ROLE
Curator, Researcher
SKILLS
Research, Writing, Sensemaking
TOOLS AND SOFTWARE
Adobe Photoshop
EXPLORE PROJECT KUPPAI
Instagram page curation with stories
[While we are no longer actively posting on social media, the project continues]
Conference paper and presentation at Typoday 2021, organised by IDC IIT Bombay:
Curating “Kuppai”: Research and Explorations with Found Type from Ancestral Attics
Conference Talk at Typewknd 2021:
Creating from Kuppai: Finding the Type in Trash
Photo Essay for Patina Magazine, 2025:
Received with Thanks: A Memoir in Lists and Bills
A NOTE ABOUT THE PROJECT
Project Kuppai began with two granddaughters seeking stories amidst artefacts in their ancestral attic, relying on oral accounts, evanescent memory and personal intuition. However, these archives also have the exciting potential of detailed typographic analysis, and aiding research on how visual culture evolves. We would love to connect with fellow type enthusiasts and researchers to take this promise forward by co-creating inspiring conversations and lending further insights to our research. What makes the Kuppai collection unique is the fact that it was already curated when I chanced upon it; this desk-full of material was preserved by a specific family hailing from a specific cultural context, during a specific time period, though the reasons are largely obscure. It contributes to the larger historical, political and cultural discourse around events which occurred parallelly. These scraps are imbued with fascinating context, as well as content. As curators, we would love for type designers and educators to study this collection, and perhaps discover something our eyes wouldn't know to look for. We hope to connect and collaborate with type and history enthusiasts who would appreciate the significance of this resource, glean new knowledge from it, and draw inspiration for their own experiments and projects. Salvaged scraps tell us about ourselves, as we have been. The human tendency to collect and to preserve, combined with the need to retrieve and reconstruct, lends us immortality, whether through a scribbled handwritten note, or the scratched-out items on a grocery list. At a time when everything feels ephemeral and precarious, the prospect of reviving and rediscovering human stories gives us hope. We live on, in ways we have not imagined possible.
— from "Curating Kuppai," presented at Typoday 2021