Geographies Of Consumption: Bombay/Mumbai | Study Groups and Public Art Projects

Geographies of Consumption: Bombay/Mumbai, is a public art project conceived and curated by the Mohile Parikh Center. Spanning over a year, it critically investigated the impact of consumption on natural resources in the city, and on human bodies, our ecosystems and cultures. Interspersed in the project are study groups, film screenings, public lectures, and an annual symposia. The public art projects will focus on urban consumption through the lens of Land, Water & Food.

Production and consumption are deeply connected to processes of urbanization, their conditions and consequences. Across the 20th and 21st centuries, there has been a proliferation of urban areas across the globe. But has this urban turn, concentrated to cities, contributed to human well-being? It is in this context that the public art project, ‘Geographies of Consumption’ is conceived to critically analyze the ‘space’ and ‘place’ of consumption in our lives.

Participating Artists: Kausik Mukhopadhyay, Archana Hande, Navjot Altaf, Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, Anupam Singh, Prajakta Palav, Mansi Bhatt, Kush Badhwar, Parag Tandel, Sahej Rahal, Prajakta Potnis, and Justin Ponmany

Study Groups: February to April, 2015

1. Orientation Circle with participating artists, architects, urban researchers, and social scientists
CONA Foundation, Mumbai
2. Study Group: Water
Facilitators: Ekonnect Knowledge Foundation, including experts from the Water Supply Department, Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM), and Econ Pollution Control Consultants
3. Study Group: Land
Facilitator: Collective Research Initiatives Trust
4. Study Group: Food
Facilitator: Kamala Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture and Environmental Studies (KRVIA), Mumbai

NB: The study groups on water, land, and food were held at the Academy of Fine Arts and Craft, Rachana Sansad, Mumbai

Public Art Projects:

Isles Amidst Reclamation
Artist: Ranjit Kandalgaonkar
July – December 2015 | Installations
Library, Bombay Natural History Society and Research Room, Department of Archives, Mumbai

This is an interactive installation at public libraries/archives in the city, showcasing research methodologies to undertake a ‘detective-style’ exercise uncovering reclamation stories. The libraries and archives imagined to be part of this interactive exercise that will form a sort of closed-circuit route to locating data relevant to following a ‘strain’ or ‘thread’ of research. Each of these institutions are close to each other, and an interested user can engage with the starting point of the narrative provided at any one site to take it further, either at the same institute or nearby. Although, for a researcher, closeness of locations via a site or a person, a book or an institute in order to quickly follow up leads is usually never the case!

For the installation, reclamation history is being accessed from all the archives/ libraries in the vicinity of the archives/libraries and the research seeks to revisit the physical sites where reclamation took place. The reclamation history of the city usually began with a localised need for land reclamation, i.e. a need to solve a local issue for a certain problematic area.

This localised reclamation inadvertently triggered reclamation over a longer period of time, (300 odd years); a protracted event that changes the geography of the city. For e.g., in the case of the Breach Candy reclamation, or the Great Breach, the need to ‘solve’ the issue of low lying land being flooded by high tide water and subsequent health and sanitation issues led to a long term reclamation that quickly (due to its apparent increase and availability of new land parcels) spread to other parts of the city.

This usually occurs due to the reasons put forth by the governing bodies such as accidents, mishaps, inconveniences to the city’s running within its then poor infrastructural set up, and the city’s dire need to improve said conditions. Another instance; the channels of water between the Old woman’s island and Bombay isle was a contentious area because boats were capsizing in the narrow channel between the two isles. It was deemed a hazardous town-condition, plus there was a need for better connectivity between the two isles. So there was a need to build a causeway by reclaiming land to ‘solve’ the issue.

The water’s edge at which the marine ecological ecosystems were disturbed are the consumed scapes where we seek to investigate what transpired in terms of the reclaimed land history of the archipelago. Reclamation very obviously disrupted the fragile ecosystem in and around these areas. One of the main aims of the interventions hope to highlight our still current obsessive drive in reclaiming land parcels from the seas, for the sake of creating ‘smart cities’ or warped ideas of infrastructure building at the expense of a sensitised approach to city development.

Game Over Company
Artists: Archana Hande and Kausik Mukhopadhyay
September – December 2015 | Workshops and Website
Kamala Raheja Vidyanidhi of Architecture and Environmental Studies (KRVIA), Mumbai

There was a big change after 1992/93 in the geography of Bombay. The city became divided on the lines of religion, physically and psychologically. Cities are not homogeneous entities. They are divided along class, caste, religion. However, we only notice a division when it is stark. What led upto the 1993 events has a long history. But this history is the history of the interpretation of history itself. As one set of historians, interprets history of India as a place for many religions, races, caste, another group has a narrower interpretation of India as a place primarily for Hindus. The latter interpretation gave rise to ideas of a mythic golden age and an enemy, on whom it could blame its destruction. This history has little scholarly presence but it produces an effective ideological indoctrination. Some time ago these voices were clearly distinguished as the voice of certain political groups, propagated though rallies and their mouthpieces. With the coming of internet that distinction has become blurred. Especially within social networking sites, with the anonymity of writers, this voice seems to become the normative. Just the volume of posts, responses and repetitions takes the place of evidence, reason and logic.

As the landscape of the city changes with new ghettos and strict vegetarianism, free speech is subdued with violence. The mythical history feeds more indoctrination, consumed hungrily at a time of all round hopelessness, a vent to the anger and an illusion of a better future. As I have mentioned earlier, the anonymity of the internet makes it look like the public opinion of masses even though it can be engineered and orchestrated by interest groups. It would be logical to work in that space as public space and use the social network sites to our advantage. History seems to be a matter of interpretation with no truth value to it. Anything is possible, as if it is a virtual game where reality gets transformed through the lens of wish fulfilment. Time, events, characters gets unhinged and arranged by the players.

As a part of Geographies of Consumption: Bombay/mumbai, we would like to make a website of game proposals. These games act as provocateur and displace the prevalent belief on the Net. Generally games are programmed to win if certain tasks are performed and depend on the skill or speed of the player. Here the result is confused/ negated depending on the condition chosen by the player. The game proposals are in form of drawings, animations, text. They are like previews of short versions of games. Anybody can comment, edit, add games to the website. Also, it will have connection to social network sites for propagation. The games will be designed with students through workshops at the KRVIA, Mumbai. Our games of history are an attempt to subvert the other history to regain the terrain with satire, humour and wit.

Amphibian’s Transit
Artist: Mansi Bhatt
September – October 2015 | Performance and Earthwork
Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai

Amphibian’s Transit, the performative earthwork at the premises of the Sir J.J. School of Art, is an extension of Bulldozer Yatra (2012) where the artist threads the act of digging land to ideas of labour, living and consumption. Through this performance, she enters into the worlds of land and water, assuming the character of an amphibian, who visits memories and dreams to find another place to live on earth. Here she imagines new geographies and manners of evolving, excavating into unknown territory like a vulnerable creature, and enduring the process of labour.

The space within the art school allows her to explore the multiple histories that this heritage territory embodies. The act of the performance is a concentrated process of digging for three days, in a search for imaginary belongings, unfolding stories of the three worlds she read as a child, her body travelling through space and time.
With used workers’ tools, the performance began through making a crack (about 4 inches), and then broadened to accommodate the artist’s body to a length of 8 metres. The outcome on the last day was a sculptural form of accumulated soil, which poetically evokes a ‘Home’. The act itself is ‘the archive’ of human transit.

Wreckage Point
Artist: Parag Tandel
In collaboration with Children of the World
Collaborators: Kush Badhwar, Minal Damani, R.B. Holle, Kadambari Koli, C. Ganacharya, Shubhangi Singh, Nikhil Purohit, and Apurba Nandy
August – December 2015 | Workshops, Video, Sound
Rekonda Quarry, Navi Mumbai

Observing the changing landscape at Thane, which is situated between two mountain ranges, Parsik Hills and Yeoor Hills, the artist visited the site several times to document the landscape, but was not allowed by local developers given the mining activities. In his project, he collaborated with an NGO to teach art to the children art of the workers at Rekonda Quarry through free activities. The children belong to the low-income migrant workers of the quarry, and the project focuses on site-responsiveness and public engagement through painting and sculpture workshops, sound, performance, text and video exercises. Stepping away from authorship, the artist allowed for the flow of ideas with a community that has no relation to art, and worked with the dichotomy of a once mountain/now quarry, and the politics of production and consumption in the frenzied city.

Konkan Nagar, Bhandup
Artist: Prajakta Palav
June – October 2015 | Paintings, Photography, Treks, Workshops, Wall Drawings and Exhibition
Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai
Konkan Nagar (Bhandup), Mumbai

Konkan Nagar is a vibrant home-grown neighbourhood in the suburb of Bhandup, which evolved since the 1970s. People migrated from the Konkan coast to work in the textile mills of Bombay, and made this hill their home, bringing in their forms of community and cultural life.

Usually termed as ‘slums’, empathetic sociologists and urban researchers call these neighbourhoods “which include many of Mumbai’s urban villages (gaothans) whether they are gentrified are not. They were developed gradually, by the people who live there, with the help of local artisans of construction, usually with little or no support of the authorities. They belong to another history of urbanization, one that is as universal and ubiquitous as the skyscraper, only much older”.

The artist is attached to corners, both in the home and the city. Konkan Nagar is a corner in the grand narrative of the megalopolis, and is a model of a sustainable neighbourhood built by the community. Over the last two years, the artist has been exploring this neighbourhood through walks, conversations with the residents, photography, paintings, and projects with students from the Academy of Architecture, Rachana Sansad. Palav shares her practice with the residents, and find Konkan Nagar to be a site that offers innovative keys to urban spatial problems.

The artist connects this space to her origins, and her paintings of Konkan Nagar are experiential in nature. With such spaces falling within the grid of the real estate industry, my project is contextualized around the loss of such home-grown neighbourhoods in the future.

Ecologies of Rivers, Flows in the Body
Artist: Navjot Altaf
September – December 2015 | Walks and Video
In collaboration with Ekonnect Knowledge Foundation

It may come as quite a surprise to many of us who live in Mumbai that this city actually has four rivers flowing through it – – Mithi, Dahisar, Oshiwara and Poisar rivers. The reason for this ignorance could well be because these rivers fail to resemble rivers today, they appear more like sewers, which we prefer keeping a distance from. It is this lack of awareness and interest in our rivers that is causing them to deteriorate into an even more pathetic state with every passing day. All of Mumbai’s four major rivers originate in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Borivli. And, it’s only within the park that the rivers are relatively clean. They begin to get polluted as soon as they exit its protected environs and enter the city. Flowing through its industrial, residential and slum areas fills them raw sewage, industrial waste and municipal waste. An RTI was filed by river activists to find whether the rivers are still listed as rivers or have become gutters officially. Thankfully, they are still rivers!

Since antiquity, philosophers and architects have seen cities as human bodies, with arteries and veins through which people and traffic flow. In this project, I see the imagery of rivers in the city to resemble the flows in the human body, with intricate tree-lie formations in the lung or veins and arteries carrying blood from the heart to keep the body healthy. Looking at the state of the four rivers and how water flows are polluted, The artist sees the city in a medical ailment with rivers having turned into sewers. In the project, the artist will have discussions with medical doctors to understand how the body functions when arteries are clogged and people resort to angioplasty/other treatments or face heart attacks. She will collect material of medical scans and video reports from a hospital, and also from the Internet. With this imagery, she combined the video footage collected through her walks along these four clogged rivers of Mumbai with images of natural forms to create a video, including interviews with Prasad Modak of Ekonnect Knowledge Foundation. The rivers are dying, and the city will see increasing floods in the future since the routes of these rivers are choked with infrastructure projects. Along with climate change and rise of sea levels, Mumbai is in a fragile situation which the planners refuse to acknowledge. The project will raise questions regarding this context.

Bhramana
Artist: Sahej Rahal
November – December 2015 | Performance
Vasai Fort, Mumbai

The history of Bombay/Mumbai is fascinating and for this project, Rahal takes an account of this history with the site being Vasai Fort in north Bombay. The present day name of Vasai originates from Sanskrit, Sanskrit word “waas” meaning dwelling or residence. The name was changed to Basai by Muslims who occupied Vasai before the Portuguese. The Portuguese named it Baçaim. The Marathas renamed it Bajipur. The British named it Bassein and today it is called Vasai. The most significant past in Vasai’s history is the reign of the Portuguese for 205 years. Historically, the entire region has attracted traders and merchants from Rome, Greece and Middle East. In 1295 AD, Marco Polo visited Thana/Vasai area.

In the second half of 16th century, the Portuguese built a new fortress enclosing a whole town within the fort walls. This fort stands till today with the outer shell and ruins of churches. This is the site of the artist’s performance, with the fort as the liminal space of land and the sea, a geographical site with its global port history of trade, profit and power.

Bhramana is a series of ongoing performances; each performance is different from the previous one and performed in a different space. The idea behind the “Bhramana” performances was exactly this—to test the potential for myth-making within the city, especially in its transitory spaces where the narrative of the city, rife with tensions, plays itself out in real time. In Geographies of Consumption: Bombay/Mumbai, the artist will perform the fourth in this series, , which is something like a wandering, spiritualist act in a historical fort. The characters are influenced by Paganism, Shamanism, mythology and even Anime – quite a patchwork! Joseph Beuys and his Shamanistic acts are major references.

With his performance pieces, often it is about negotiating space – public space – and identifying their layered history with my imagined characters and their interaction with people in the city. I fashioned a musical instrument out of PVC pipes and branches, which is played in the performance. Through the character of a ‘Nomad’, the artist invokes the wanderer, and the philosophy of ‘nomadism’ that counters the notions of geographical space, territorial production, identity, and power is the core of these performances. His performance is a philosophical encounter with the ideas embedded in this project, particularly of Bombay/Mumbai.

Mumbai Hyponatremia
Artist: Anupam Singh
October – December 2015 | Installation and Film
Vasai Vikasini College of Visual Arts, Mumbai

The desire of working and living in this city is one of the principle factors which make Mumbai one of the most densely populated cities in the world. With Mumbai having less than 0.03 acres per 1,000 people—the lowest in the world, the demands for housing and related infrastructure are increasing every single day. Hence, the state government along with various housing development authorities is constantly looking out for land to execute various housing schemes. The ‘From Hutments to Tenements’ policy seems to an answer to the city’s crisis of land for building houses, that envisages resettling Mumbai’s slum-dwellers in housing projects that could be developed on the 2,700 acre expanse of salt-pan land in the city. The state government has zeroed in on 400 acres of salt pan land along the Eastern Express highway in Mulund to relocate slums from central government land under Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) scheme.

On one hand, where this SRA housing project on salt pan land in Mumbai looks quite lucrative and an easy option to address the land crisis in Mumbai, on the other hand it raises questions about the price the city might have to pay for such projects. Both citizens and the environmentalists have expressed their concerns over this matter. According to activist, Cyrus Guzder, Mumbai is vulnerable to storm surges where a combination of high winds and high tide could lead to a rise in sea levels. Mumbai Hyponatremia will be an intervention that will closely look at various aspects of these lands and understand the impact of the future developments will have on the environment as well the city of Mumbai. My project will be in a way an artistic archive of these lands, exploring and mapping the landscape through ground research into the biodiversity of these lands, geographic location, history and cultural practices of the sites.

With the difficulty of gaining permissions, the main intervention will be located at the Vasai Vikasini College of Visual Arts as it is located surrounded by active salt-pan lands. After an artist’s talk at the college, thirty students will be enrolled to collaborate with the artist. This will be followed by ground research and interviews with salt-pan workers and the manager of the site. Video documentation of the site will be conducted, whose footage will be used in the final film. The film will be screened on a 10 feet/8 feet screen made of canvas cloth installed in the premises of the art college. Salt will be collected from the surrounding sites, and filled in plastic pouches and questions on paper on open spaces and development policies will be inserted in the pouches. These pouches will be pinned to the screen over which the film of 16 mins will be screened at the site.

Geographies of Production
Artist: Kush Badhwar
October – December 2015 | Film

The artist was predominantly in Hyderabad through the duration of this project which focused on Mumbai. Rather than returning to Mumbai to hurriedly immerse himself into the site-specific, he wonders about the possibility to utilize his distance to explore another dynamic of the project. For the last year or more, Geographies of Consumption: Bombay/Mumbai has served as an instigator and container for a variety of ideas, dialogue and action related to the politics of water, land and food (and more, he believes) in the city. There is an ecology to the project itself, in the bonds that have or are being formed and the traces that have been produced and consumed from these bonds. He is interested in this container — its properties, its in/abilities, what goes on inside, and its potentials.

At the outset, he proposes to focus on material that exists in and around the project: research matter, images, sound and text extending to the sites, projects, and collaborators involved with Geographies of Consumption: Bombay/Mumbai. By way of interaction undertaken through this focus, he hopes to collate such material. Further, this material may be re-imagined or new material may be collaboratively imagined or generated.

After this stage, he sees a constitution of this material forming an artwork, likely to be in the form of a video-piece or printed publication, which could be showcased at the project symposia and further platforms later. The collected/generated material could also be made available to all involved or the wider public, which we could discuss as the project progresses.

Handbook of Brief Recipes
Artist: Prajakta Potnis
December – February 2016 | Interviews and Performance

Brief Recipes, which deals with the food histories of the city, the meat bans, and threat to traditional recipes in the face of the homogenization of food, the artist collaborated with AuthenticCook , which works with women who preserve traditional recipes in diverse communities and contribute as home chefs to AuthenticCook, inviting people to savour, remember, and share stories of foods under threat. Her performance included sharing stories of food on the local trains in Mumbai from Churchgate to Vasai, through conversations that occur in everyday travel. The final outcome will be a handbook of brief recipes found in Mumbai, tracing its histories of migration and food.

Entrée
Artist: Justin Ponmany
April – May 2016 | Performative Drawing Actions

Through walks and performative drawing actions, the artist collaborated with students in the form of an outdoor study along a road in Khar, where there are a number of sick and cut trees. The students sat at different places along this road drawing and documenting the space, while subtly addressing the politics of nature and culture in the city.