[Reader-list] Hygiene and the City: IFS Post 2

[Chitra Venkataramani]

Hygiene and the City.
Second post.

I have spent the past month figuring out the stories that constitute
the book and collecting data.

The book has three parts. The first part is a compilation of parts of
interviews that looks at individual notions of cleanliness and order,
mostly in domestic set up. It also goes through Advertisements for
cleaning products, objects catalogued as being harmful (taken from old
newspaper articles).

The second and the third parts of the books both chronicle traveling
through the city in trains. But while the second part looks at the
journey as a series of maps, the third is the journey of a medical
student in a crowded compartment, looking at the idea of paranoia and
contagious diseases.

 The second part of the book is narrated by a woman who imagines clean
and unclean as ideas that exist simultaneously. Her story maps objects
in a busy market place, the difference between private and public
gardens, and lastly the naala that run along the Central Railway line-
where is it the deepest, where is it murky and where is it clear; what
vegetation grows around it (strips along the railway lines are given
away for farming vegetables like spinach and coriander) and where do
these vegetables go?


The third part narrated by a medical student looks at the idea of
proximity and disease. If we go in a crowded train, what diseases do
we catch? How clean are crowds? Of course, it moves from the
surroundings in the train itself to how he imagines the disease will
enter our bodies. It also looks at ads put inside trains for curing
infections like ringworm to ads for faith healers and the ergonomic
data based on which spaces are designed.


Another part that had to be resolved was the language of each of the
three stories. The fist was pretty clear as each image could change
with the excerpt from the interview. The third borrows its language
from medical posters and from the ads, where figure are drawn out as
stenciled lines or as figures in screen printed pamphlets. I am still
working on a language for the second story.

I will be posting a few images from the book by next week and upload
them onto a blog. Will post that link later next week.

My primary sources of data have been newspaper ads (articles taken
from CED), Books documenting ads from the 40's (especially post war
advertising), books on anatomy, ads posted around the city on
telephone boxes and inside trains, and product design projects like
domestic scrubbers, road cleaning devices and a few medical posters
(hard to get- hospitals do not encourage people taking pictures or
even borrowing the posters)
-- 
Chitra Venkataramani
7B, Orchard Avenue,
Powai Mumbai 400076
9819 474375
www.flipsearch.blogspot.com