[Reader-list] [Announcements] Building Sight

[Monica Narula]

*Building Sight*
A Curatorial Project by Raqs Media Collective
for
On Difference #2
Concept : Iris Dressler / Hans D. Chris

Kunstverein Stuttgart, Germany
18 February to 30 April, 2006

http://www.wkv-stuttgart.de/en/programme/2006/exhibitions/on- 
difference-2

[with Sanjak Kak, Ruchir Joshi, Satyajit Pande, Solomon Benjamin,
Ravikant Sharma, Prabhat Kumar Jha, Nancy Adajania, CyberMohalla
Ensemble, Sarai Media Lab and the Sarai.txt Broadsheet Collective]

'Building Sight' is a sketch of how a way of thinking about a city
has to be constructed, brick by brick. Cities are being built all the
time. Construction never ends; no one can say precisely when it
began, work is in progress.

The task of constructing an image of a city involves more than
collating material about buildings, roads and walls. It also requires
you to render all the arguments and feelings that gather around a
place. There is no guarantee that all this will resolve into a neat
diagram of urban utopia. Every indication, in fact, is to the contrary.

The pleasure of our immersion in cities lies as much in our awareness
of their discord as in their design. To think about cities is to
consider relationships: between a planned city and its messy
footprint, between tower block, hollow ground and dust bowl, between
a wall that you can lean on and a house that is demolished, between
cul-de-sacs and streets for walking. Between the admonitions
inscribed on surfaces and the never-ending games and dreams that are
played out and whispered at street corners and crossroads.

The city can strike you as a maelstrom. Evictions bring new people
from all over the hinterland – as dams flood valleys, as plans spiral
out from blueprints, emptying forests, fields and pastures. Old towns
haemorrhage into the metropolis. The city swells, becomes strange,
crowded, dense. Old evictions breed new ones. A city becomes
something you have to hang on to as you lurch into daily uncertainties.

And yet, time is sought for pauses, for breath, for play, for
dreaming, for the carving out of spaces and handholds and corridors
which make the city a place to live in, regardless. And there are
encounters that bring things face to face when eyes have to meet
eyes, gazes have to cross and settle on the beholder and the beheld.
And there are conversations – some strident, others tentative; some
even have episodes of accord.

A building site is a place where people bring things with which they
will construct something. Building sight is an island of design
inlaid into the surface of this construction. 'Building Sight’ brings
together a number of different visions in order to provoke new
conversations about the making and unmaking of cities.

'Building Sight' is a provisional index of a handful of conversations
that we have been having for some time. With friends, colleagues and
correspondents who have helped us to think about what it means to
live in cities.

One is an architect, two are documentary filmmakers, one is a
cinematographer, one a curator, critic, writer. Then there are
collectives and communities - a writer and a community worker, three
editors of a broadsheet in dialogue with a designer, a constellation
of media practitioners in a working class neighbourhood. Each of
these, many from Delhi, some from Mumbai, one from Bangalore – is a
stranger to galleries. Their work anticipates, rather than
represents, what the response of contemporary art practice can be to
the South Asian city.

The dialogue that we have had with these practitioners has led to an
eclectic mélange of possibilities, and the tentative laying of
foundations, as a series of fragments creates unsettling, pleasurable
provocations. In all of this we can see arguments gather; we see
images of disparate dreams and realities unsettling maps, plans and
blueprints.

Sometime in the 19th century, a poet who lived in Delhi, Mirza
Asadullah Khan Ghalib, gave voice to a query about his city.

'What is Delhi?' I ask myself.
I reply, 'The world is a body, and Delhi, the soul'

In the end, building sight - brick by retinal brick, pixel by pixel,
frame by frame - is a consideration of what it means to continue a
conversation with the body of the world, and its soul.

=========================

*The Dispute at the Dam Site*
- Sanjay Kak - (1958)
Video/ 19” screen/ 5’ 30”/ sound
Production year: 2006
Production credits: Camera: Sanjay Kak Sound: Samina Mishra
Courtesy: Artist

This video is an elaboration of a sequence in Words on Water (2002),
Sanjay Kak’s documentary about a two-decade peoples’ movement against
big dams in the Narmada River Valley in central India.

A dam site is a crater. A dispute – between a people who live by a
river and a state apparatus intent on taming the river and evicting
its people – is a fault-line. The crater fills with people and is
hollowed out again. A confrontation between democracy, dams and a
district collector becomes a tremor. Valleys empty and cities wait to
be filled in.

Sanjay Kak is a filmmaker. He lives and works in Delhi.

=========================

*Gurgaon Giraffe*
- Ruchir Joshi - (1960)
Video/ 19” screen/ 3’ 16”
Production year: 2006
Production credits: Camera: Ranjan Palit Editing: Sara Kolster + Iram
Ghufran
Courtesy: Artist

An excavator in Gurgaon, a suburb of Delhi marked by factories, ‘new
economy’ workspaces and expensive real estate.

An excavator is a hungry beast. It forages, dancing a slow hypnotic
dance, digging the city into becoming, scooping out hillocks of earth
with its jaws. Those evicted by dams find their way into the city,
only to confront the excavator's hungry jaw, wherever they turn.
Evictions breed evictions. Hollow ground makes way for new hollow
ground.

Ruchir Joshi is a filmmaker and a writer. He lives and works between
Delhi, Kolkata and London.

=========================

Work Title: *Manus*
- Satyajit Pande - (1973)
Video/ 19” screen/ 7”
Production year: 2005
Production credits: Camera: Setu/Satyajit Pande, Editing: Shan Mohammed
Thanks: Amit Choudhury, Surabhi Sharma, Kavita Pai, Sunil Shanbag,
Amitabh Kumar
Courtesy: Artist

Manus is the anatomical name for the terminal segment of a forelimb –
in humans, the hand and wrist. In colloquial Hindi and Marathi, two
languages spoken extensively in Mumbai, ‘manus’ also means ‘human
being’.

Mumbai’s suburban railway network ferries millions of commuters every
day, and epitomises the tenuous grip that the inhabitants of Mumbai
have on their city. Hands in trains create constellations of
accidental intimacy, enter found solidarities, speak a vocabulary of
silent gestures. A routine of handclasps anchors and cushions the
daily uncertainties of a dense metropolis.

Satyajit Pande is a cinematographer and a photographer. He lives and
works in Mumbai.

=========================

*City Guide I*
- Solomon Benjamin - (1960)
Lecture performance/ Video/ projection / 17’
Production year: 2005
Production credits: Realised in collaboration with Sarai Media Lab
Courtesy: Artist + Sarai Media Lab

City Guide I is a ‘theory-performance’ that uses PowerPoint
presentations, research notes and speech to create a dense web of
associations and information about transformations in the cities of
the south.

Benjamin uses maps, drawings and photographs to tell a fascinating
story about the contests between planners and the ‘hydra’ of informal
and improvised urban forms. For Benjamin, this contest shapes the
contours of urban reality in many new and emerging cities all over
the world.

Solomon Benjamin is an urbanist and architect. He lives and works in
Bangalore.

=========================

  *Autopoesis*
- Ravikant Sharma - (1967) + Prabhat Kumar Jha - (1967)
Video / projection/ 8’+
Production year: 2005
Production credits: Realised in collaboration with Sarai Media Lab
Courtesy: Artist + Sarai Media Lab

A collection of Found Poetry from auto rickshaw cabs in Delhi opens
another pathway into the imaginary of the city.

The streets of Delhi are anthologies of mobile poetry. Auto rickshaw
cabs – three-wheel motor scooters and Delhi’s most ubiquitous form of
personal public transport – are surfaces inscribed with pithy
couplets that span a spectrum of sentiment ranging from laconic irony
to surreal humour, from gentle heresy to rage and romantic ardour.
Auto-poems, read fleetingly as rickshaws speed by, register as
precise and personal annotations on the epic text of a vast metropolis.

Ravikant is a historian and writer based at Sarai-CSDS. Prabhat Kumar
is a pedagogue and social activist with Ankur Society for
Alternatives in Education. Both live in Delhi.

=========================

  *In Aladdin’s Cave*
- Nancy Adajania - (1971)
Inter-media installation (Digital prints/ text/ slides/ projection)
Production year: 2006
Production credits: Images sourced from Mahendra Camtech and
Fotofast, Mumbai. Research supported by a Sarai-CSDS independent
research fellowship.
Courtesy: Artist

In Aladdin’s Cave is an archive-installation that emerges from Nancy
Adajania’s research on popular digital photography.

The photograph is an object poised between the obligation to index
reality and the desire for the picturesque and the fantastic.
Neighbourhood photo studios in South Asian cities inherit a legacy of
intervening on the very surface of the portraits they make for their
clients. The cheap and easy availability of digital imaging
technologies and software takes this further. The door of the street
corner studio becomes a portal to strange new worlds that are within
everyone’s reach.

Nancy Adajania is a curator and art critic based in Mumbai.

=========================

*A Wall and a Sofa*
- Cybermohalla Ensemble - (2001)
Video/ projection/ 48 mins
Production year: 2005
Production credits: Cybermohalla Media Lab at Dakshinpuri, Delhi +
Sarai Media Lab, Delhi
Courtesy: Ankur Society for Alternatives in Education, Delhi + Sarai/
CSDS, Delhi

The Cybermohalla Ensemble, a flexible constellation of young, working-
class media practitioners in Delhi, has a five-year history of
interventions in informal common spaces and contexts in the city.
Their video work is also narrowcast on neighbourhood cable TV networks.

Sometimes an alleyway can become a salon. The inhabitants of crowded
cities create islands of conviviality when and where they can. A
bench leaning against a wall can become a sofa: an invitation to sit
for a while, chat, relax and relish the passage of time in the course
of a busy day.

Cybermohalla is a collaborative process initiated by Sarai-CSDS and
Ankur.

=========================

*Ectropy Index*
- Sarai Media Lab - (2000) (Jeebesh Bagchi, Mrityunjoy Chaterjee,
Iram Ghufran, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta)
Interactive hypertext infoface/ projection and computer
Production year: 2005
Production credits: Research support from Taha Mahmood
Courtesy: Sarai Media Lab, Sarai/CSDS

Ectropy Index is the third in the series of interactive info-face
works made by the Sarai Media Lab over the last five years. Like
Global Village Health Manual 1.0 and Network of No_des, it builds an
argument through research notes and repurposed cultural material.

“Ectropy” means a general increase in organization. An “ectropy
index”, therefore, is a measure of the increase of information, or of
order, in a given system. Identity cards and identity theft,
fingerprints and forgeries, surveillance and shadows, data bodies and
data crashes, biometrics and body sculpting seem to define
significant features of the topography of our moment. Ectropy Index
seeks to create a tension between entropic and ectropic impulses
continually contesting the levels of order and systematization within
a system.

Sarai Media Lab is based at Sarai-CSDS, Delhi.

=========================

*Sarai.TXT 3.1: City Games*
- Broadsheet Collective - (2004) (Iram Ghufran, Shveta Sarda, Aarti
Sethi. Designed with Mrityunjoy Chaterjee)
Broadsheet/ 23 x 36 inches/ folded/ colour
Production year: 2006
Production credits: Produced at Sarai Media Lab + printed by
Kunstverein, Stuttgart
Courtesy: Sarai-CSDS, Delhi

City Games is a special edition of Sarai.txt, a periodic experimental
publication that interprets and renders research about urban realities.

City Games treats the material and immaterial surfaces of the city as
a site for the elaboration of questions and provocations, rather than
as a stable structure. It turns the ordered forms of urban space
inside-out, and opens up a poetics of the ‘interiority’ of exposed
spaces in the routine of the city.

The Broadsheet Collective and Mrityunjoy Chatterjee are based at
Sarai-CSDS, Delhi.

=========================

Monica Narula
Raqs Media Collective
Sarai-CSDS
29 Rajpur Road
Delhi 110054
www.raqsmediacollective.net
www.sarai.net


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