'Mumbai uses space cunningly'

India will participate at the Venice Biennale for Architecture with an installation, writes Vinit Nikumbh.

India, which has no feature films at the Venice film festival, will however participate at the Venice Biennale’s 10th International Architecture Exhibition on ‘Cities: architecture and society.’

It will be represented by the Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI), along with 12 other institutions presenting projects on cities worldwide. According to the UDRI, it is the first time India has been invited to participate at this biennale, which takes place from September 10-19.

The UDRI was formed to protect Mumbai’s urban environment and promote interaction between architects and urban designers. For Venice, it commissioned a project conceived by architect Kapil Gupta and artist Neha Choksi, in collaboration with filmmakers Ashim Ahluwalia and Shumona Goel.

Through an installation currently put up at Banganga consisting of a 40’x4’ scaffolding, and three films, it explores how space is cunningly manipulated in a dense city like Mumbai by government officials and citizens alike.

The exhibition has been supported by the Jindal South West Foundation, as well as the Roshni Design Foundation and Masters Fellowship Fund.

Says Gupta, “The installation examines how the future of Mumbai has been conceived, as opposed to how the city actually perpetuates itself. The BMC’s Development Plan (DP) legitimises or overlooks developers who pay for changes in the DP’s land use, middle-class balcony extensions and slum-dwellers who account for 50 per cent of the city’ population, but whose settlements are voids on the map. The plans are archaic, unrealistic and a complete fantasy. There is total lack of vision for Mumbai’s development because the DP made 30 years ago is no longer relevant.”

According to Choksi, “The idea behind the installation is a line drawn in the DP at 1:2500 scale. At a 1:1 scale, this line magically gets assigned a 1.2-metre width, which we have translated into a 40 x 4 feet scaffolding along a DP line in Banganga. It is an act of child-like misbehaviour to assign to a dimension-less map line, an actual dimension in the real world. We wanted to create space out of nothing—just as Mumbaikars do.” The filmmakers record the interaction between the locals and the installation.

Says Ashim Ahluwalia, “My film is really just a document of this scaffolding in Banganga and how people use this narrow strip of space. Soon, bhajiwallas set up shop inside it, kids played on it and homeless people slept in it. We are using a time-slice technique, so you see many activities, separated by several hours, simultaneously in a single image.”

The Venice installation will be a modified version of the Banganga one —as a walk-through space from where the viewer can watch the films.

There will also be a catalogue—a Mumbai Reader—edited by Pankaj Joshi and Rahul Mehrotra of the UDRI, a compilation of writings on Mumbai. Choksi is also directing two films for the exhibition— Absent Decay and Found Green, on Mumbai’s illegal buildings and vanishing green spaces. In Found Green, an individual hunting for green spaces in the city, discovers that many of the green spaces marked in the DP are used for other purposes, so he plants saplings in those spaces. Found Green is more like Future Green.