By Christopher Frey

In much of India the repurposing of used materials is a way of life. One item, however, has long remained outside this cycle of reinvention: the oil can. For artist-architect Sanjeev Shankar, the ubiquitous container triggered a set of questions about consumption and sustainability: What happens when the death of one purpose liberates another? How can constraints trigger innovation? And what happens when you engage a community in that process of creation?

Shankar collaborated for three months with the residents of Rojakri, an urban village on the outskirts of New Delhi, to create a public art piece that explored these notions, with the oil can as its defining element. The result, a 70-square-metre shade canopy called Jugaad, was on display last December at Delhi’s 48°C Public.Art.Ecology festival. Fashioned from 945 cans, the installation floated gracefully above the ground via pulleys and steel cables, with built-in halogens that lit up the natural-pink steel skins at night.

“Jugaad” is a popular Indian expression that describes acts of everyday innovation. It’s the social art of making things happen – the hustling, resourceful, quasi-spiritual Hindi equivalent of Nike’s “Just Do It.” Partway through his collaboration with the villagers, Shankar decided on the project’s moniker as a way of celebrating both the open-source process it sparked, and the kind of grassroots ingenuity our imperilled planet so badly needs.

By day, Shankar’s Jugaad hovered like a proto-machine-age flying carpet, providing shade for the meeting place below. At night, it emerged out of the inky dark as something even more outer-worldly: winds blowing through the pores punctured into Jugaad’s skin were transformed into shrieks, while the whole assemblage, like a tempest-tossed vessel, struggled to break free from its tethers. Which answered another of Shankar’s trigger questions: What happens when a thousand oil cans decide to fly?

Christopher Frey is an itinerant Toronto-based writer. His non-fiction book, Broken Atlas: The Secret Life of Globalization (Random House), is due out in 2010.