After completing the first year of the Odisha Craft Odyssey's annual residency and fellowship programme, we have begun the second round of engagement with resident researchers through the same residency programme. The first iteration focused on engaging with the Bell Metal Craft from various parts of Odisha. In contrast, the second shifted to exploring appliqué craft traditions from different regions of the state. The curatorial framework and research guidelines remain consistent, aiming to understand the heterogeneous social, cultural, and historical significance of these crafts today, moving beyond the singular identity often associated with traditional practices dictated by the state and region. Similarly, the research approaches of residents and fellows studying Bell Metal craft (examining making processes, production conditions, historical importance, and evolving social structures) differ significantly while working with the appliqué craft, especially in the context of contemporary Odisha. The decision to focus on appliqué craft in this second phase follows our initial engagement with bell metal. This craft is nearing extinction, in contrast to appliqué, which is celebrated within its cultural and traditional contexts, along with the participation and expansion of the artisanal community. One craft is male-dominated, often seen as everyday utility, and rooted in pragmatic use; the other is perceived as woman-centric and more sacred. Yet, I believe these portrayals are romanticized views of how these crafts are practiced and situated in Odisha's current socio-cultural landscape. The research directions for this residency, working with the appliqué craft, aim to challenge these romanticized narratives, interrogating the politics behind its popularity, and revealing how such recognition can create an invisible network of governance in the production, reproduction, and dissemination of the craft. Appliqué craft, traditionally practiced in Pipli, is no longer confined to that area. It is no longer just a craft village nor solely practiced by certain artisans, but an expression that also reflects regional and cultural identity beyond its original locale. Extending such research inquiries, the exhibition, as an outcome of the OCO 6-Week Residency Programme, proposes counter-narratives to ‘Popular Pipli', in the context of the evolving times the craft has gone through in the recent past. The exhibition ‘The Popular Pipli' features research projects by three programme residents as part of the OCO Residency Programme 2025. The researchers, Madhulika S. Naidu, Rhea Moras, and Raj Maurya, come from different academic and creative backgrounds, have worked on their individual projects, developing alternative perspectives that challenge and expand the understanding of the appliqué craft of Odisha. Using Pipli as a case study, the residents gather a wider collection of lived histories that broaden the cultural consciousness of the craft clusters and community participation in understanding the evolution of forms and their symbolism at various stages. Madhulika S. Naidu’s project, ‘Against All Odds: The Chandua And The People That Embody The Craft’, investigates how the craft has developed over time through detailed research on motifs, forms, stitching techniques, and the stylistic transitions in Odisha’s appliqué work. Her academic papers, including ‘Stitching The Historical Narrative of Chandua’ and 'The Role of Women In Pipili Craft and Its Resonance', analyse the shifting social hierarchies in craft production, highlighting how certain communities’ participation and their aesthetic orientation have overshadowed the artisanal autonomy and cultural heterogeneity of the craft today. As part of this research, Madhulika has also developed grounded theories, culminating in a mixed-media installation that showcases the evolution of techniques, motifs, and processes across different times, presented as co-existing epistemologies influenced by various timelines and geographic influences. Overall, her research and the related works, such as 'Embodied Knowledge | Chandua and Pipili Craft', demonstrate a thorough engagement with the craft’s genealogy and aesthetic transformations, alongside personal narratives of artisans connected to their livelihoods and cultural upbringing. Similarly, Rhea Moras approaches her project as an interdisciplinary artist and designer, focusing on different sewing techniques used, especially with the widely used chain stitch in Odisha’s appliqué craft. Her research stems from her personal relationships with various stitching styles and understanding their methodologies used in appliqué work through building interpersonal relationships with the artisan communities. During the residency, she also developed a participatory project, ‘Ame Pipli Ra Jhia', aimed to create shared spaces for conversation, care, and dialogue with women artisans, emphasizing how the process itself fosters relational meaning in hearing women’s stories and the narratives of how they situate their artisanal identities in the larger context of the collective production. Likewise, the artwork, ‘what holds’, inspired by stitching techniques of appliqué work in Odisha, explores the various levels of irony with the interdependent relationship between the stitching and materials. The work questions the gendered structures of production through the division of labour and empowers the role of women, indexing the fragility and the resilience through continuous repetition. At large, Rhea’s entire project titled ‘a reversal’ emphasizes her engagement with the community, locating spaces between the authorship and artistic anonymity, women’s roles within the larger craft-making network, and stitching techniques as embodied knowledge. The third section features Raj Maurya’s project, which documents how the idea of labour is distributed across various craft clusters in Odisha, contributing to the image of Pipli appliqué tradition in the present. Being an archivist and photographer, his practice revolves around different ways of documenting histories through storytelling, the act of collecting and working with testimonials as living records. Through this residency programme, he has been interested in working with cyanotype printing and archival photographs, connecting them to craft’s cultural legacy and examining the dichotomies between community and individual, between what is being valued and what is discarded as part of the changing landscape of the clusters. Using cyanotype, Raj explores themes of absence, disappearance, and the language of fading, while connecting them to organic and mechanical production as vital aspects of the craft-making process. Overall, this research project, Raj highlights and philosophizes the repetitive nature of craft, which is both a practiced skill and an evolving form of mechanical reproduction, integral to the conditions and networks of making in both historical and contemporary contexts. Through these research projects by the residents, the second edition of Odisha Craft Odyssey broadly establishes a curatorial premise and proposes frameworks of thought, aiming to question the evolution of Pipli and its various representations in recent times. The exhibition: The Popular Pipli, as a provocation, opens possibilities to see, recognize, and question the conditions of production across different traditional techniques and approaches of appliqué work, which collectively contribute to the discourse on the appliqué craft in Odisha. Similarly, this exhibition also seeks to engage with various networks working within different craft clusters that have interpellated from Pipili’s cultural and geographical history at different times and in different locations. Known for appliqué, Pipli is often regarded by outsiders as a monolithic tradition, practiced and lived as part of its cultural heritage. In this way, the regional identity of the craft and its connection to Pipli has become a singular, homogenized identity. As the French philosopher and cultural theorist, Micheal Foucault states that such processes of homogenization generate further heterotopias, complicating the distinction between what is real and what is a reflection of reality. Today, Pipli craft villages serve as symbolic epicentres and heterotopic constructs. They are both physical sites and imagined cultural symbols for Odisha’s appliqué. When new craft clusters in nearby villages source and (re)produce Pipli appliqué work, they create heterotopic sites that both mirror and differ from Pipli, forming a layered geography of practice. These mirrors exemplify heterotopia, reflecting reality while simultaneously displacing it. Building on this curatorial concept, the exhibition invites viewers to explore the invisible networks and systems of power behind the traditional craft-making process today. Titled "The Popular Pipli: Threads of Memory, Networks of Power," the exhibition serves as an inquiry into narratives, representations, and social-cultural influences that highlight alternative perspectives on identity, authorship, and artistic autonomy. As the craft is celebrated and documented through its historical significance and diverse making processes, this research residency creates opportunities to engage with the web of knowledge being shared over time and to navigate gaps and ruptures, thereby expanding the discourse around the craft in contemporary times. In this way, while examining the conditions and methods of production, particularly through decentralized labour and gendered hierarchies, the research and exhibition share an image of appliqué craft of Pipli, which perhaps has not been seen as part of the cultural consciousness of the craft and the village. Sibdas Sengupta