Aspinwall House

The story of Aspinwall House

Aspinwall House is not a building so much as a working plan laid out on the ground. Office block, residential bungalow, warehouses, outbuildings — arranged for the movement of goods between the road and the water, with the harbour on one side and the town on the other. Nothing about it was designed to impress a visitor. That is precisely why it is the most atmospheric space in Fort Kochi.

The godowns are enormous, plain and structurally honest: long spans, high roofs, wide doors sized for cargo, floors worn by a century of loading. The coir godown in particular has become the signature Biennale space, and much of what people remember about the festival — the scale, the light, the sense of art placed inside working history rather than a white cube — comes from this one room.

Stand at the seaward edge and the logic of the place resolves. The compound faces the harbour it was built to serve. Everything that made Kochi rich came past this frontage. The estate sits on the road running from Fort Kochi towards Mattancherry, which is to say it sits on the spine of the spice trade, halfway between the European quarter and the warehouses of Jew Town.

What was traded here is worth reading slowly, because it is the economic history of Kerala in a list: coconut oil, pepper, timber, lemongrass oil, ginger, turmeric, spices, hides, and later coir, coffee, tea and rubber. Some of those are ancient Malabar exports. Others — tea, rubber, coffee — are plantation crops of the colonial economy, and their appearance in the ledger marks the point where Kerala's uplands were remade to feed European demand.

The Biennale did something unusual with all this. Rather than restoring the compound into a polished heritage attraction, it left the rawness alone and put art into it. The peeling walls, the industrial volumes and the salt in the air are part of the experience, and a great deal of the festival's international reputation rests on this compound's refusal to be tidied up.

It helps to know that the compound is not a preserved relic with a company name attached to it. Aspinwall and Company is still trading out of Kochi — shipping and logistics, coffee, coir, rubber plantations, tourism — and this waterfront estate is corporate property belonging to a going concern, not a heritage site awaiting a use. That single fact explains most of what frustrates visitors here: why there are no opening hours, why nobody is selling tickets between Biennales, and why the parts you are shown are the parts the owner has agreed to lend. The Biennale is a tenant of a working company, and always has been.

The catch, and it disappoints people every week, is that Aspinwall House is privately owned and is not a public monument. It opens principally as a Biennale venue, and typically only parts of it — the coir godown and the director's bungalow — are ever given over to visitors. Between editions the gates are often simply shut.

Legend & myth

The building you photograph is not the building John Aspinwall built. This is the most common misunderstanding about the site, and it is a matter of record rather than opinion.

The company was founded in 1867. But the great fire of 1889 tore through Fort Kochi and destroyed a great deal of the quarter, Aspinwall's premises among them. The structure standing today dates from after that fire, generally given as 1890. So when a guide tells you that you are looking at an 1867 building, the arithmetic does not hold: you are looking at the replacement, put up by a company that had just watched its warehouses burn.

A second and gentler myth is that Aspinwall House is a Biennale building. It is not, and the reverse is closer to the truth: the Biennale moved into a working colonial trading compound and took its character from it. The art is the newcomer here by about a century and a half.

The fire is worth telling properly, because it is the reason so much of Fort Kochi is younger than it looks. On 4 January 1889 a pattemari lying off the premises of Brunton and Co. caught fire. Wind and current pushed the burning vessel ashore, into a waterfront of timber godowns roofed with thatch — about the most combustible arrangement a nineteenth-century port could have devised. Something on the order of three hundred houses and commercial properties went, Aspinwall’s among them.

So the godowns that are now among the best exhibition spaces in India were built by a firm doing disaster recovery. The scale of them, the height, the long unbroken floors that curators now covet — those are the proportions of a working cargo shed put up in a hurry in about 1890, not the design of anyone thinking about art. That is the quiet joke of the Biennale: the space works so well because nobody was trying to make a gallery.

The founding is usually told as a beginning and it was really a purchase. John H. Aspinwall did not arrive on this coast and build a trading house out of nothing in 1867; he bought one. The business he acquired that year belonged to Scott Brothers, and what he did was put his own name on an existing concern and expand it — into shipping, timber, spices and agricultural produce, and eventually into the long list of commodities that ran through these godowns. It is a small correction and it changes the character of the story: this is a nineteenth-century acquisition, not a foundation myth.

And here is the thing almost nobody visiting the Biennale realises. Aspinwall and Company did not become history. It is still trading — one of the oldest commercial firms on the Malabar coast, still headquartered in Kochi, still a listed company, with businesses in shipping and logistics, coffee trading and export, coir, rubber plantations and tourism.

Who owns it is the better part. In 1956, when the firm became a public limited company, the royal family of Travancore acquired a shareholding. In the early 1970s the English owners decided to disinvest, and the family took over the major part of the stock; it has held the controlling interest ever since. So the compound where the international art world gathers every other year belongs to a British colonial trading house that is now controlled by a Kerala royal family — the ownership of the place having quietly changed hands in exactly the direction the art inside it tends to talk about. Nothing at the venue says so.