Raqs Media Collective

Nancy Adajania
Solomon Benjamin
CyberMohalla Ensemble
Ruchir Joshi
Sanjay Kak
Prabhat Kumar / Ravikant Sharma
Satyajit Pande
Sarai Media Lab
Sarai.txt Broadsheet Collective

„What is Delhi?“ I ask myself.
I reply, „The world is a body, and Delhi, the soul“.
(Mirza Ghalib)

Cities are building sites. Construction never ends; work is in progress. “Building Sight” - brick by retinal brick, pixel by pixel, frame by frame - is a consideration of what it means to start a conversation standing where we are located, in Delhi, with the body of the world, and its soul. The city can strike you as a maelstrom. The city swells, becomes strange, crowded, dense. Evictions breed evictions. A city becomes something you hang on to as you lurch into daily uncertainties. Yet, time is sought for pauses, for breath, for play, for dreaming, for the carving out of spaces, handholds and corridors which make the city livable. “Building Sight” is a sketch of how a way of thinking about a city can be constructed. It is also a provisional index of conversations that we have been having for some time with friends, colleagues and correspondents – architects and urbanists, filmmakers & cinematographers, researchers, practitioners, editors and designers – who have helped us to think about what it means to live in cities. Many of them are from Delhi, some from Mumbai and Bangalore. To us, their work anticipates, rather than represents, what the response of contemporary art practice to the South Asian city can be.

Works and Projects

Nancy Adajania, In Aladdin's Cave, 2006, Installation (digital prints, texts, slides, projection)

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.

Solomon Benjamin, City Guide I, 2005, Lecture performance/Video, 17 min.

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.

Broadsheet Collective, Sarai.TXT 3.1: City Games, 2006, broadsheet
Sources: Mahendra Camtech; Fotofast, Mumbai. Together with: Sarai/CSDS independent research fellowship.

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 (design) are based at Sarai/CSDS, Delhi.

CyberMohalla Ensemble, A Wall and a Sofa, 2005, Video, 60 min.
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.

Ruchir Joshi, Gurgaon Giraffe, 2006, Video, 3:16 min., camera: Ranjan Palit; editing: Sara Kolster, Iram Ghufran

An excavator in Gurgaon, a suburb of Delhi marked by factories, ‘new economy’ workspaces and expensive real estate. Ruchir Joshi’s film interprets the earth mover’s movements as a slow, hypnotic dance of destruction. The blurred image transposes the action of shaping urban spaces on to an expressive register that is just as disturbing as it is lyrical.
Ruchir Joshi is a filmmaker and a writer. He lives and works in Delhi, Kolkata and London.

Sanjay Kak, The Dispute at the Dam Site, 2006
Video, 5:30 min., sound, camera: Sanjay Kak; sound: Samina Mishra

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.

Satyajit Pande, Manus, 2005, Video, 7 min.
Camera: Setu/Satyajit Pande; Editing: Shan Mohammed; Thanks to: Amit Choudhury, Surabhi Sharma, Kavita Pai, Sunil Shanbag, Amitabh Kumar

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.

Ravikant Sharma / Prabhat Kumar Jha, Autopoesis, 2005
Video, 8 min.

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.