24/03 - Departure, arrival in the Netherlands

Silence…
No car-hoinking…
Where are al the people gone to?
What’s with the snow…
Brr cold…
Everything in the Netherlands is so organized, formal and bureaucratic. I’d never would have noticed this without visiting Mumbai…

20/03 - Intervention

In the final week our task was to do some sort of intervention in our nagar. An intervention could be anything which ‘disturbs’ the daily life of the slum-dwellers. For example the group who got the 13th-coumpound as there nagar created a couch of bottles as a social element in the public space. A couch as the stereo type ‘public element’ in the public space.

What we did is to let the children in our nagar draw there ‘dream house’ and also what there father’s job is. What was quite interesting is that the children draw the exact same ‘ideal’ house as western children do. A hip roof, with a round window in it and two square windows symmetrically juxtapositioned with the entrance door in the middle of the façade. The house is positioned in a green hilly landscape with, of course, a beautiful smiling sunset. We pasted the results of our intervention al around our nagar on the walls of different slums. Our goal was to paste the drawings from the children on there dwelling were the live, but this was to difficult and to hectic in the end.

18/03 - Baptism

In our nagar, the Muslim-nagar, we were fortunate to experience the baptism of a boy and a girl. In the Muslim culture when a boy is being baptized, two goats are being sacrificed and for a girl, one goat. So in total three were sacrificed that day. The father of the boy explained to as the procedure of the sacrifice, the goat is being sacrificed according to ‘Hallal’. Which means that they cut the goats throat and let the blood flow out of it, so that the animal is clean. Which is different from ‘Hamar’ which means unclean.

After this explanation we joined the festivities and we got to ate the goat who had been sacrificed the same morning (and it tasted excellent :D)

16/03 - Ellora caves

This weekend we went to Aurangabad, to the Ellora caves. There is a total of 32 temples witch represent different religions, carved out of the rocks. Temple 16, the middle one, is by far the most important and the most beautiful of them. This is an Hindu temple with the name Kailasha, Shiva’s mountain abode. This rock cut out architecture is regarded as the greatest monolithic structure in the world. The task of cutting out the approximately 3.000.000 cubic square feet of rock must have occupied at least one hundred years.

Food

The food in India is superb!! Usually I’m very picky with food, but almost everything I ate here was delicious. I think this is the only country in the world where I could be a vegetarian :D Below are some pictures of the food. Chicken masala, chicken afghani, masala dosa. The good stuff.

10/03 - Mapping Dharavi main road

The object here was to map the more important roads in Dharavi. You have the 90ft road, the 60ft road and the Dharavi main road as the three main roads. Furthermore you have some smaller ones. We got the Dharavi main road as our road to analyze. We analysed it at three different times, during the morning, afternoon and the evening. What is most peculiar in general to say about the results is that this road never sleeps. At every time of the day there is activity going on.

Dharavi is a highly dens area of course, almost every square inch is being build upon. Except a cricket field which we came across. It was interesting to see that they leave this space open.

08/03 - Trainride

This day we visited some temples and some mosques. But the train ride that day was a very intense experience for me. The amount of people waiting is enormous and as soon as the train arrives you feel the tension of the people. The moment it stops it is every man for himself, trying the board in the limited time it stops. If you manage to get on the train the next goal is to stay on it, during the next stops it will make.

Compared to the Netherlands this is very informal and for me a fascinating experience. In the Netherlands everything is arranged, the guy blows his whistle after checking nobody is entering or exciting, the doors close, machinist waits for the green signal to depart etc.. In Mumbai the doors are always open, the train just stops for 4-5 sec and that’s the time you have to get on or get of. What also strikes me is that ‘almost everybody’ buys a train ticket, although I haven’t seen one single guy checking if you have a ticket.

Video of the trainride

04/03 - Mapping the border

The object was to map the borders of Dharavi in a similar way we mapped Delft last week. Ten Indian students joined us today for the workshop. We were divided in 6 groups of 4 people. Three Delft students plus one Indian. If you look at Dharavi it has three ‘corners’. So at every corner two groups. One group walks clockwise and the other counter-clockwise across the borders of Dharavi. In every single group one person focused on smell, one on noise and one on view and ‘vibes’.

Some different smells I encountered were: Cardboard, fire, exhaust fumes, spices, barbeque, smoke, smell of waste, public toilet and a sewer smell.

03/03 - Arrival

Mumbai, the maximum city, so many cars, people, children in particularly, stuff lying around. This city is always alive, waking up around 4.00 am and already reaching it’s maximum around 8.00. The whole of Dharavi looks like one large market. It’s amazing to see that the people use every square meter of floor space they ‘poses’. On the ground floor, in every building stuffs are being sold or processed in all sorts of ways. Spices, clothes, vegetables anyway food in general. But also recycling of almost every material, wood, cardboard, oil barrels, plastic, shoes you names it. People looking at us either if we have some bad disease or we are movie stars. I haven’t figured that one out yet.

Bio-mapping

The workshop was about mapping, but not in the 'traditional way'. The main idea was to map a certain area in Delft, trough your senses (your urban body :p). Rather than using your eyes, using our ears, nose, hands, feet (smell, sound, touch). The tools we had were blindfolds, ear-defenders, GPS-devices, lie-detectors and decibel-meters. We were split into two different groups of approximately six people. Our group decided to do three mapping-exercises in pairs of two. The pairs consisted of one ‘guide’ and one ‘victim’.

One victim was blindfolded and had a lie-detector on, one victim was high, blindfolded and had a lie-detector on and the last one (me) had no lie-detector on and was blindfolded. The guide not only guided, but also took notes from the things the victims were saying. Like:
“This is a very crowded place”, “I don’t feel safe here”, “I smell coffee”, “I hear children”, “Shit I stepped into a pile of water” Below is are final result and some impressions.

biomapping

Photographing workshop

Thursday and Friday we had a photograph workshop. Our first exercise was to take the 'baddest' picture ever. So before i started thinking of what a 'bad' picture is, I asked myself what a 'good' picture is.

For me a 'good' picture is one where the object is somehow in the centre of attention on the picture. Usually in the centre. The picture isn't overexposed (of course this depends) or moved, anyhow the object should cleary be accentuated. So i took some pictures around one who was moved, one overexposed andso forth.

The one below I like best because ususally the object which you want to 'catch' on camera is in the centre of attention. What I tried to do is to annoy the audience with accedentially put a small piece of a building at the lleft bottom and also showing the window frame at the top, slightly tilted. People ask themselves, what is that?? O it's a piece of a builing, why is it in the left corner not centered and why is the window frame on the top visible.

"Post-deconstructivism"

The workshop from Monday and Tuesday was to build an 'informal settlement' outside architecture. When I heard this I was really shocked, a slum!? here?! It turned out to be a really nice workshop because you are undergoing experiences that people in Mumbai face daily.

To give an expample, we where faced with the security guys from FM who didn't allow us to pick certain materials, so it was al about being discreet as possible. An other feeling I personnaly had was that I felt really exposed. When we where dragging al kinds of materials people where looking weird and you could hear them think 'what the hell are they doing??"

We had a group of five people and we had a budget from E 50,- (E 10,- p.p.) to spend on food, the slum, interior etc.. We spend E 25,- on the slum and E 15,- on food. We spent E 20,- for the slum on a crappy Saran plastic material which afterwards was very expensive and there was to little on the roll. We had in mind to cover the airholes with the Saran. The other E 5,- we spent on a good joining material, rope.

Benny Lava

Here's some music from India ;)

Dharavi

Here are some images from Dharavi and some other images related to the contradictions, which we are faced with, rich/poor, legal/illegal, formal/informal etc.

enjoy!

AW

week 1 thoughts

The workshops of Monday and Tuesday (experiencing space) where very inspiring. Today we live in a modern transient society. The people living in the metropools of today come across a lot of contradictions and shifts in events, ‘overexposure’ as Virillio called it in his article ‘the overexposed city’¹. Therefore we (people living in these metropools) create an protective organ against all these influences. This organ protects against the profound disruption with the fluctuations and discontinuities of the external milieu threaten it. Instead of reacting emotionally, the metropolitan user reacts primarily in a rational matter, thus creating a mental predominance through intensification of consciousness, which in turn is caused by it. Thus the reaction of a metropolitan user to those events is moved to a sphere of mental activity which is least sensitive and which is furthest removed from depths of the personality².

What we did, in my opinion, this past two days is trying to ‘turn of’ this protective organ and experience space as pure as we can. With al our senses, especially not the ones you use daily, like the eyes, but also trough sound, through smell , trough touch.

What also was interesting was the notion of how you think of your body. Do you use your legs only to move or do you really live ‘inside’ your legs. Becoming more aware of your lungs, breathing, smelling, touching, experiencing your body. Becoming more aware of the spaces you are in.

1.: The metropolis and Mental life - Georg Simmel (blz. 12) 1903
2.: The Overexposed City - Paul Virilio (blz. 544) 1984