Sharmila Samant: Loca-Cola

Coke bottles seem identical, but differ subtly from one country to another. These variations in taste and appearance highlight the simulacral nature of the Coca-Cola bottle – a semblance of an imagined universal ideal. The incursion of multinational brands into local markets reflects a form of neocolonisation; but despite limited technical facilities and economic constraints, local recycling practices thrive out of necessity; local vendors, often resourceful and inventive, repurpose discarded branded bottles to package their own beverages.

Sharmila Samant began the Loca-Cola project in 2000; he collects glass Coca-Cola bottles from various countries and juxtaposes them with distinctly local flavours to explore the polemics of ‘local’ and ‘global’: “Is the ‘local’ inherently oppositional to the ‘global’, or is it an intrinsic part of it?