Studio Co-ordinators:- Prasad Shetty
Pranav Kadambi
A city undergoes multiple transformations in culture, routines, practices, and built form through the course of time. A city is not a whole but is made of multiple nuanced parts that appear, disappear, and intersect with one another. Here, the course aimed to dissect the multiple layers and stories a city holds through a thorough process of reading, watching movies, and unraveling our family’s history.
The city was seen through the lens of 4 ages, or sectors. These were the agrarian, trading, industrial, and service sectors which chronologically place themselves respectively in the timeline of the city. In this framework, each student anchored their family’s history to either of these sectors and prepared a thorough narrative of the mundane, absurd, and everyday dynamics of the characters prepared in the stories. Among these exercises were walks around various parts of Mumbai and its surrounding areas- Erangle Beach at Madh, Dharukhana as the industrial port of old Bombay. These emphasised the changes a city faces in its timeline.
Landscapes at Darukhana
Among the readings were extracts of writings from Ursula LeGuin, Edgar Allan Poe, Walter Benjamin, George Orwell, and others- these complimented our methods of storytelling and narrative-making by helping us frame the city and its characters. Movies such as ‘The Hole’, ‘Ajantrik’, ‘Rashomon’ and ‘Chungking Express’ produced an idea of the relationship between the multiple forces, densities, society, and city have with each other. These were assigned every day and were discussed during each session where the various elements were dissected. These kept us engaged in the spheres of the city and stories.
A still from ‘Mon Oncle’
Beyond the making of narratives, we produced multiple drawings to express it further- these were in the form of landscapes, random objects of the every day as well as the house and home.
The various stories of the four groups came together to form a comprehensive narrative of Mumbai and its shifts, routines, and the landscapes that surround it by speculating what it was, what it is and what might it may become. The concluding assignment was to form a book of this compilation, which came to be titled ‘Of Inheritances, rats, letters and Anxieties’ as a cue to some of the elements which each story had respectively. The module was a simple method of self-learning and understanding to a fair depth, the workings of the city and the bodies that make it.
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