Introduction to the project brief While working with Art in Transit, the objective was to facilitate a dialogue between the people and the urban spaces they inhabit and are surrounded by. By providing the transit spaces as a platform for intervention, the collective was looking to change the current context of place making as a singular, isolated space constructed for a single formal use. The public space studied in terms of its political, aesthetic and socio-cultural significance brings to light the established association to the space before our intervention began. Our basis for any collaboration was further based on the intial research about the metro as a public space ( a case study in understanding the dynamics of a public space. )
Site Location Site map primary research, photographic analysis, surrounding reference site.
The space Bangalore as a rapidly developing urban space had its latest intervention in regards with the growth of the city on 20th October 2011 when the first metro line was implemented for a smoother daily commute through the city. To work as a parallel transport line to the roadways which had been getting flooded with the ever increasing traffic, the metro had established in its nascent stages an association which would benefit a relatively smooth run during the construction. Following the Purple line was the Green line in 2015 with the pending inauguration of the east west corridor on 16th April, 2016. The access to this mode of public transport brought in, as expected in a city as plural as Bangalore, the accepted, dissapointed or dissmissive aspirational values of those a part of the execution as well as the audience affected by it, directly or inversely. This project implemented by the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Ltd (BMRCL) was to be the next step towards the developing identity of Bangalore as a Metropolitan.
Cubbon Park Situated towards the east entry of Cubbon Park, the metro is surrounded by the BSNL office and Press Club of Bangalore, HAL, Chinnaswammy stadium to name a few landmarks. It has four entry ways, each of which named after the closest associative landmark, Chinnaswammy entrance, Jet entry, HAl Entrances. The metro coming from MG road moves underground as it approaches Cubbon Park metro not letting it congest the visual aesthetics of Cubbon Park. This metro station is a connecting radial points from the back of the high court to the New Indian Express building, with no other metro falling in the radius.
By naming it Cubbon Park there is already an adding associative value to the metro in relation to the history of Cubbon Park as one of the green lungs of the city. The reverse association of the metro being a connecting point to the tourist attraction the park holds is also established in the process.
Vidhan Soudha Metro Station Located between two of Bangalores most crucial establishments, the High Court and the Vidhan Soudha, this metro station has also adhered to the significance of the aesthetic value of these two buildings and been constructed as an underground segment of the same metro line. Surounded by more official, government buildings, colleges and hospitals, there has been a better understanding in the kind of crowd this metro is going to pull into its stations. The location of construction is not only viable to the political significance of the space but is also culturally an anchor point to the tourism that this area pulls in. The metro is another step closer to the Central Bus and Metro Junction at Majestic Stop. The variablity in crowd, use and association these two metros bring in have been considered while planning interventions for the specific sites.
Cubbo Park Majestic
Vidhan Soudha MG Rd Sir M Vishveshvaraya Trinity
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Cubbon Park Metro Station Area
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|| The collective
The idea of working in a collective was new to my process of working. Collaboration, discussion and feedback sessions were not heirarchial and are open to varying opinions. The project incorporated projects and conversations amongst 35 odd number of students, faculty and research assistants working together to build a data base for context of the metro, Bangalore and the spaces related to it. To justify the research of such a vast platform the number helped pulling in various interpretations of the understanding of the space.
|| Shared Spaces Vidhan Soudha
Project opportunities
Open access to a space that functions on a seperate formal functional level questioned the moral and ethical approaches of our project. The liability or projects had in creating a collaborative interactive process brought about interesting insights through the course of the project.
|| Practitioner in flux
What does it mean to be a practitioner in a world that is so rapidly changing. Questioning the constant shift in perspectives, ideas, clauses of public spaces, the idea of working under this project was to be on par with the shfting geo-social, geo-political and geo-cultural context of Bangalore as a metropolitan.
|| Interdisciplinary approach
The project was open to students coming from diverse backgrounds. Space design, product, animation, contemporary art practitioners, digital media, information design students got together to understand and intervene in this site specific project to build through a hollistic approach on the idea of public place making
Affective Nature of Migration to a shifting landscape
Bangalore experienced three formal ways of migration that have been majorly documented. Indentured migration, where the form of migrants was somewhere beterrn slavery and freedom was the first major wave. Followed by Emigration under Kangani system according to which the migrants had a choice of tenure and displacement as a family rather that seperating migration. Through these two was an ongoing waveo of free migration of those who had been exposed to the various geographical influences and were moving outward to establish their own micro communities in various parts of the world. Some commuities that fell into this patter were the Chettiyars, Pathans, Marwaris, Muslims and Sikhs. Moving alongside the 2nd half of the British coloial rule, this could be one of the more recent migration patterns. Prior to these there were constant migratory patterns noticed with the incoming of the Mughals and the constant shift in power of the geographical space we know now as Bangalore between the Cholas, Gangas, the Vijaynagara Empire and Kempegowdas rule. The phenomenon
Migration as a phenomenon is as ancient as the start of civilization in search of food, shelter and clothing. Earlier endeavours relating to migration were initiated with unforseen futures, where the movement to the new place couldnt promise them anything. The term According to NSS migrants are accounted based on their current location is relation to their place of birth. The question that arose during this phase of research was the question of the label of “migrant� that defines the rights of a person. As a migrant the liberty one has in a new state is sufficiently compromised which alters the right to equality. The experience The experience of a migrant is a temporary one, once the stay has prolonged, the person is no longer a migrant in his experience. The novelty of the experiences fades and the experience transcends into a affectiveness of a certain familiarity established with the space. But in a state with a constantly shifting landscape due to the constant incoming population, the hollistic experience of novelty keeps getting revived. So then who is the migrant? Is it the movement of the person that makes him a migrant or the shifting landscape that remakes him as a migrant. The point of contact established in
this situation is circumstancial, based on the theory of the situationists, the common point isnt in the coooncious undertakings, the the underlying subconcious reactions. (Cognitive revolution). Considering how evolution constantly changes what is innate to what is aquired, how then does this theory of cognitive revolution seek to establish a claim into human behaviour.
The affected surrounding With the constant shift in the inhabited and the inhabitor, there is bound to be a constant shift and mix of the visual surrounding. A research into the visual culture could establish the background, intensity, domination and vocabulary of the heterogenous space. A non linear area of study, the visual culture of Bangalore has had a vast variety of influences that brought it to its current state of time. Mindful of the historical significance, the Bangalore as a place making example is a wild and undisciplned amalgamation of various cultures. The affected nature is easy to be presumed as a counter effective situation of the new taking over the old rather than the new as an offspring of the old. The latter approach was helpful to analyse the dynamic social interactions in space and be the closest to achieve an unbiased outlook of the affective events. Migration as an catalyst in this constant shift, allowed the sense of belonging to be brought into people by letting time spent be the factor to consider a person a migrant or not. A study of the social significance of a neighbourhood to the places of enquiry brought light to the affective nature of migration of the aspirations, aesthetics, associations and projections of and for the city. Narayanpillai street one of the oldest streets in Shivaji Nagar, has although retained its duality of commercial and residential nature, has managed to increase in the variability of each of these natures. If the traders had 4 percent variety 50 years ago, the shift has been to 60 percent in the products availaible on this street.
Likewise, the increase in variation of the resident inhabitants has also been noticed over the years, with the community harnessing a mixed community livelihood . The intensity of this variables is validated through the historical significance and visible in the aesthetics of the space. Visually there is a heterogenous value to the streets studied in this area. The city has been a canvas that has been layered and provocated through time in turn respoding the the occouring situations. The research of NarayanPillai Street initiated in the previous semester aided me in the latter half of the project as basis for anchoring my visual context. Universality of the experience The experience of each migrant could and would vary in specifics, the number, the names, the body that encompasses and single persons situation is a variable. What unfolds in the constancy in the shft, the need to keep reviving ways to adjust to newly formed societies and ideologies. This nature of the migrantion makes it a phenomenon from an unchartered territory. In a sense every person then is a migrant and everyone is experiencing the phenomenon of migration. Theoretically validating the theory of cognitive revolution the tangible understanding of this experience is what I was interested in. How could a physical experience, create a visceral, etheral and psychological connection amongst people who have come to believe that the only point of contact
M G Road as a referenced case study
Aesthetic, Cultural and historical significance
Trasit as an experience, perspective and direction The amalgamation of various features viewed in the already constructed stations gave us a strong anchor point in terms of the initial association through which we entered the project. The various aesthetics and aspirational features working as the attributes has had its individual and hollistic impacts on the resident users of the metro. The process initiated an enquiry into the symbolic value of the metro as the past, present and future of the city. The network that transcends time and space.
Through referencial documentaries, embodiment excercises, walking maps, we gained access to the experience of the metro in multiple perspectives. What started coming to notice was the acknowledgement or disregard for the haphazardly growing aspirational values of Bangalore. Words like metropolis, “next Singapore”, “next Manhattan” cropped up in the film Our Metropolis which had documented the reactions, repurcussions and discussions around the construction of a metro station. Moving between pride and disgust the project faced heavy tugs throughout its making. Political factors dealing with urban displacement, economical exploitation, collateral damage were brought up and a few even considered this event to be the start of the end of heritage in Bangalore. Relative nostalgia was a recurrent theme in the reference data we had been studying. The non issue of somebody elses memory of Bangalore was brought to light and the bifurcation of various problems seemed to weaken the argument that was building against the metro.
An older haven for shopping, cinema and liesure, MG has retained in nature to bring in people from varying stratas of society for years now. Though in the process it has not only contributed to the increasing traffic but has raised the requirements of multiple connecting lines to the road. Accessible by road, nearest railway line at Cantonement and now the Metro line MG road is now allowing its growth to continue by creating more pathways for crowd flow. With its social and historical significance being taken care of, what was causes a kink in the inclusion of the metro was the already existing space crunch it would contribute to.
The aesthetic values expressed by the metro, too, allowed a sense of diffused plurality to the associational aspiration it held. Grey and steel as its color and material and the recurrent red in its exterior palette, the tokens issued for the commuters of the metro oriented its value of transport to Kempegowda’s with the image of his tower view on it. The welcoming language in writing was English and Kannada which included the sound instructions issued for public user guidance was catered by these two languages. The names of the stations to add locational value of the individual stations was based on the most popular landmarks over which the metro line moved like a parallel path. Our approach was to collect as much data as we could about the site before we could undertake any further steps into our individual research.
Since there is no such entity as ‘ the public’, since the public is merely a number of individuals, the idea that ‘ the public interest’ superscedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning : that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of the others” Ayn Rand
Personal areas of Enquiries - Public Space and Place Making Considering the huge network of verbal communication that initiates a certain pattern, theme and flow in places I was interested in understanding the creation of a similar, dynamic parallel interaction through non verbal , sensorial mediums in or around the transit. My area of research delved into migration as an experience, a number, a circumstance, a phenomenon and a factor in the changing urban landscape of Bangalore. This involved gathering data of migration patterns vertically through time and horizontally through the varying factors the affected it and vice- versa. Referencial data here included NSS census sheets procured at the IIHS (Indian Institute for Human settlements ) library, literary sources such as Sulman Rushdies, Imagining Homelands, The Ground Beneath her feet, Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson, Annihilation of caste by B R Ambedkar, Cooking Section collective, ALon Schwabe. The data collected brought light to the
constant and variables experienced through migration as a global and local phenomenon. The constant was the moving variability of spaces and people observed and experienced as a by product of shifting populations alongside shifting landscapes. The constant was then the acknelwedgements of point of contacts that kept forming in the process. The research data procured is a collection of images, embodiments and observations documented by regular visit to site and offshoots of it.
Verbal communication as a phenomenon The access to sites came for me with the liberty of being somewhere on the middle ground of the extremes of the audience catered to. Verbal communicative methods seemed to be paradoxical to its own inclusive and exclusive nature. What welcomed a
certain crowd disjointed another part of society in its being. The phenomenon of verbal communication as an aspirational strategy questioned the sense of belonging created by it. Namma Metro, as a Kannada- English offshoot showcases the marriage of two languages and cultures yet propogated the possessive nature of Namma as a nationalistic venture. A supposition around the growing nationalistic process of inculcation is visible in the language spoken by the staff, the sound instructions and the culmination of everything to be trade marked as a Bangalore byproduct. The shift that came to notice was from the coherancy and appropriate nature of verbal language into more of an appropriation and propogatory incentive used as a tool to homogenize rather than diffuse.
Intensity of Social Contact Due to the nature of intervention that was being followed, one that was heavily influenced by an Art school background, many moral and ethical values of our process were being questioned. A right to intervene in a public space by a group of people was obliged to consider the oublic platform we were making ours. To expand on the social interactions the place could offer, we had to understand the psyche and phisiology the space and people related to the metro could afford. Pushing the affordance boundaries was an eventual method that was undertaken but the process involved reaching the closest manner of hollistic understanding. During this time is when the questions related to hollistic involvement, place-making, the invested aspirations and the inclusive nature began developing. As much as we expanded to involve a larger crowd, there was always a certain sector that was getting left out. To be liable to an entirety of situation was becoming a blockage rather than a progressive approach. To extract the maximum threshold of experiences in this one point of social contact at the metro required us to understand that the hollistic nature we were chasing after was a certain utopia which perhaps was a Sisyphean task.
Maximum intensity and affectiveness of social contact was being looked at as a collective effort rather than individual interventions. This is when the project moved from being individual research areas to a combination of enquiries of 35 people of the collective. The hidden enquiries of those not directly a part of the intervention were also considered. The staff of the metro, the commuters, the future generation, the historical events were all to be a part of the endeavour this collective was initiating.
An example of one institutionalised criteria to define a person is directly related to the understanding of a migrant. Nationalism as a defining factor has established invisible boundaries which manifests itself justifying boundaries of language, behaviour, mannerisms, psyches, clothing, routines and the projected aspirational value of the singly large geographical state. Gellner rules that, “ NAtionalism is not the awakening of nations to the self-concious, it invents nations where they do not exist. Creating more differences than alliances in the immediate surrounding.
The construction of imagined boundaries.
Social Amnesia
Public space as an offshoot of the private space or vice-versa, which each individual inhabits has been over time creating smalled, blurred boundaries which are tertiary boundaries of the institutional criterias of identity and yet they have manifested themselves in the daily interaction or disconnection of one individual from another.
A collective forgetting of a part of history has been studied in circumstances related to a trauma, political eneavour, identity constrction and cultural dominance. A variety of studies showcase the phenomenon which is a result of dissmissive nature, changing circumstance or the forgetting that comes with changing interests. With a rapid change in culture and political dominance political agendas
are strategised around this phenomenon to provoke a sense of dominance and understanding of the historical significance. A study on mice shows that the inability to produce oxytocin which enables social familiarity through the sense of smell can compromise the associative value of the mice. Relatively when the sensorial facilities of the human conciousness ae altered through sub-concious manipulation, there is a loss in familiarity of events, situations and people. This when inspected under a single roof, like that of the metro makes the metro an anchor point for this varying social amnesia that exists and thus make the metro a platform to bring in subconcious empathy rather then
Private spaces within public spaces The process of enclosing oneself within a certian boundary in a public space comes when the public space is shared with a part of society where there is no tangible form of connection visible. The notion of opening a door to gain access into a private space from
the public space surrounding it, pulled me into the spatial understanding of fragmentation of spaces within a singlular space by the erection of a wall or door or portal for access. The public transit space seemed extremely viable as a platform to this visceral experience of access to personal spaces that had been observed during the research phase. The notion that self contained worlds exist and are functional is giving a frame to the space that is inhabitated. The mechanics of a self contained world have its tertiary connections if not primary or secondary to a world beyond their own, and to gain access and acknowledge this network could be an outlet into a more interactive space. Interactivity doesnt have to be of physical, tangible forms. It also has its roots in the familiarity that is spoken about under social amnesia.
Exploring affordance of color Color as a tangible aid, holds affordance through formal choices, of creating a certain experience, mood, emotion and association. Although while studying the color mood wheel of various cultures, there came to light the subjectivity of this afforded nature.
Phase 1
Design Process The initial proposal extracted itself from the research enquires that had come forward through my research. I wanted to study the phenomenon of shared spaces and shared experiences. By a set of formal choices to create the space, I was hoping to understand how a combination of provoked emotions, experiences and ideas brought a non-linear, non- isolated experience. Having eradicated the use of verbal language for the chances of it creating a certain barrier, I started hunting for non verbal elements we interact with on daily basis that are indicative and affective by nature. The initial element that afforded minimal dissection of its being and the closest to a universal association was color.
With increasing subjectivity towards events, the affordance of a single color has been extended from its most formally established associations. To pick a color and engulf a space in its values, created a certain idea of the space and yet it couldnt be written in stone what the experiences would be for any particular individual in contact with the space. My initial iterations revolved around placing single colors to cut off and at the same time visibly notify parallel, simultaneous emotions that could be experienced in what was formally a single isolated space. Early oonset artist inspirations ranged from literature, film to artist installations that played with this idea of color.
Color as an element had an afforded element of being subjective to association, emotion, experience and yet it tied everyone who had access to the visual world to relate to the experience created by color. That is to acknowledge the affective nature of color and not focus on its subjective nature. Working with the paradoxical nature of Wes Andersons set direction, I was hoping to achieve a certain universality of space at the same time keeping these visually independent spaces with open access visually.
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1,2. Kurt Perschke - the red ball project 3. Amsterdam - cuyperspassage 4. U-Bahn. Š Patrick Kauffmann. 5. Wes Anderson - The underwater aquatic with steve zizou
using the same color palette for the background and foreground ( Eduard Benito Garcia )
a repetation of color palette gives a certain continuity of emotion of the space ( James Mcmullan)
Study of 2D painterly styles for 3D reconstruction Inspired by post impressionist painters like Eduard Benito Garcia, James Mcmullan, Jean Phillip Delhomme I wanted to see if addition of objects into the colored spaces mentioned above, with the same color palette could give an impression of a flat landscape, with no visible boundaries of the objects placed. Upon closer inspection the viewer would be able to view the smaller discripencies of volume, shape and form as it protrudes from the various surfaces of the space.
removing outlines in the sketching of objects, merging/ seperation of enitites through color and shape ( Jean Phillip Delhomme)
Initial Iterations
A critical assessment of context and concept was the expected outcome of Seminar 1. Critical questions that had been posed during presenting was based on the nature of color not being time, space or language specific.
on language
On time
On space
“All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk.” – Lemony Snicket
Comparing two references from literature, Gabrial Garcia’s 100 years of solitude and Chronicles of a death foretold, he has managed not only to play with the theatrics of time in creating a certain experience but has managed to warp the space through which the audience is maneuvered.
Humans move toogether when there is smaller understanding of space, as the space in which this habitation exists grows bigger, people spread out, mix with a bigger bunch and disperse into smaller groups, thus allowing human navigation of conversations. Can the space here be increased, to not feel like a capsule for 100’s of commuters and allow smaller, interest oriented interactions.
Walking through the station, and it is a long walk, the path seems never ending, yet there is a rhythmic continuity to it. To create this feeling of continuity in a space that has transitory, that was meant to be a momentary experience.
Seminar 1
On reading Bendict Andersons ‘Imagined Communites’ it came to my notice that a lot of segregation of communities was built on the system of memory. Stories have the liberty of doing the same without risking being taken too seriously or too lightly. In one of his writings ‘ The naïve and the sentimental novelist’ Orhan Pamuk expresses the outcome of those who nurture “a love of novels”: “ developing the habit of reading novels, indicates a desire to escape the logic of the single- centered Cartesian world where body and mind, logic and imagination, are placed in opposition. Novels are unique structures that allow us to keep contradictory thoughts in our minds without uneasiness, and to understand differing point of view simultaneously.”
Applying this understanding to process how I could slow down or fasten time in the transit space, as a space that has paused, where you are walking but going nowhere from what you see. You just seem to be walking an unending path. The motivation is one image in front of you, but its essentially leading you to a more psychological acceptance of what is happening through the imagined movement in space and time. “Two objects moving in opposite directions create a relative velocity of the length of the objects by the amount of total speed of each objects” So say if the person in the metro is in a hurry, the video footage of a train would make him feel slower than he actually is. In another approach, for those entering the transit for an experience unrelated to the metro trains, they have come in from a place where speed is to be maintained if the city has to keep working, can time in this capsule then be slowed down for them/?
In a transit space, either standing alone or in a couple, there seems to be an invisible bubble surrounding those who are a part of this body and are the reason for its functioning on daily basis. By visualizing these human resources who fuel the proper working of a system created by the human resource as a human body one can immediately choose to situate themselves in the space provided and gain a sense of belonging. Can maps be reworked to symbolize a working body, machine, functional organism which is run by the working of not just the human commuters but also the staff, the construction workers the designers. It’s a way of questioning who influenced the growth of a child. The parents, the DNA, the food provided, the behavioral influences, the external influences, anyone who’s ever been in contact with this body that grows. Can narratives be drawn to the past experiences the space has witnessed to showcase it to the incoming crowd?
Theough the placing of color in the metro space was trying to play with the affordance of the particular colors, the relevant context hadnt come through deeming the iterated ideas lacking basis. The context through which the choice of colors had been made was not coming through for the specificity of the metro. The seminar feedback also directed me to look at color through objects to increase the variability of affordance I was trying to achieve.
Curatorial Theme The traveller
Our curatorial frame had been dissected into four major recurring themes that had emerged through the first 2 months. Aesthetics and Aspirations was the frame that dealt with contexts directly extracting from the urban context in question. Participatory Network looked at working and creating through the pattern of the commuter or the passerbys dealing with a collaborative understanding of systems. The Otherland was almost a 180 degree shift from the first frame which dealt with the idea of transporting the commuter into a space not contextually placed at the metro. The traveller which eventually became the theme under which I based my concept worked with the nature of being a person in transience. The fleeting, combination of experience that is formarly associated to the vagabond, the uncertain was coming through this theme. The understanding of the traveller, a shifting body of ideas on a shifting landscape opened a wide range of associative qualities to be tested. This idea started tying together with blurring the boundaries of private/public spaces in terms of the constantly changing idea of public and person for the traveller. The intention of my project was to study this nature of fleeting points of contact. The existence of something so fleeting was understood to be temporary by nature. The whole environment couldnt be kept intact and in the process of constant shift, traces or fragments of an experience was what would be left behind. Bringing in two spaces, which contradicted each other, I started working with the aesthetics of a house and the architechture of the metro space at Vidhan Soudha. Vidhan Soudha The metro site where this conversation is going to be established had to be as paradoxical as the nature of the traveller or the temporary sense of belonging. Placed right opposite the Vidhan Soudha, whos architechtural style itself is a mix of various cultures seemed to be an appropriate surrounding for this intervention. The other reason dealing with social amnesia was the fact that the two surrounding buildings were strong footholdings in he identity of Bangalore, and my intervention looked to question this sense of “belonging� that has been developing in Bangalore.
Artist Inspiration Phase 2
Emerging forms through context The extraction from the research context to translate the enquiry into a tangible process started during this phase, where form study and iteration became the foreground to our construction of project. A huge chunk of my form was still hanging lose, the aesthetics of the house hadnt been narrowed to a specificity. The visualisation I had given out had yet to be worked on through the lens of a certain context. This specificity wasnt to be confirmed till three weeks into iteration. The form of my structure shifted multiple times, moving to and fro between justifying the initial research and the latter themes I was working with.
1. Do Ho Sun Home within home 2. Leandro - Cool Mirror, Dalston House 3. My bed - Tracey Emin
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Working with a public space brought to notice the social implications of an art intervention. Moving away from isolated platforms like galleries and museums, the shared usage of public space allowed the work to intertwine through the already existing space. The implications of certain factors were brought to notice through the approach I had followed of a fragmented space. Traces
Phase 3
Emerging themes A lot of artist work related to the visceral feeling of a home as a private space started cropping up. From the transparency of spaces to shifting spaces, artists had reached out to intervene in the psyche of a public space user. To incorporate what I was paying attentoin to in the set, I started dissecting work to understand how they had through formal means, and aesthetics of space and material formed a wave of public acknowledgement of the wedge between private and public spaces.
The notion of traces is to bring to notice the dynamic nature of an individuals existence. When every part of history is erased it is easy to evaluate your own existence without any relevance to what was or what is going to be. The insight into continuity of time and space can be manifested in the form of traces which hold the rememnant of what had once occoured, thus connecting you to situaitons and people beyond the physical radius the individual is a part of. In Do Ho Sun’s work “Home within Home within Home” he questions the sense of belonging, the artist defined a ‘home’ as one’s intimate, ‘clothing(skin)-like space,’ which could thus be a ‘space of portability’ allowing one to fold it up and carry it with him or her. His work has looked at ‘transcultural displacement’ - the process through which a space are endlessly given layers of new meanings as it crosses the spatial and temporal boundaries. The material used also gives a sense of etheral experience, which could vanish in the blink of an eye or become as quickly redundunt as it was a novelty. The temporality of his spaces and the ephemeral experiences brought out are a lot to do with his experience of spatial migration through his childhood. By placing a model of his childhood home, he has catered to questions like the continued nostalgia through space that connects to completly distinct spaces. Confessional Traces Tracey Emin
Bifurcated Spaces
Iterations
Anchoring in context
My body of reference was mainly around three research materials I had gathered over the past year. The first one was the research on migration I had initiated this project with. The second one that came into picture was in fact a report I had written in my previous semester based on the social significance of NarayanPillai Street. And the third body of reference came over the last few weeks. This particular study was a paper written by a fellow student around the vernacular urban architechture on India urban spaces. Keeping the first as my anchor for the emerging themes and the remaining two as reference points for emerging form I proceeded to articulate my form through the information that I had access to. The report on social significance was a study of Narayanpillai street, which is located in the Shivaji Nagar neighbourhood. It looked to study the rituals, activities, use and practices of the space to establish the intangible heritage this space encompasses. The other two variables in studying the significance are the aesthetic and historical significance which encompasses data and jargon oriented study of artefacts of a place. The data I collected gathered the social activeness of the space for the past almost 100 years. Here it came to my notice that it wasnt just the present social interactions that had built the place but the associative quality it held for having existed for all these years. The majority of activites and association noted of this place have survived for more than a decade bringing in history as a pathway for association. Association through history, association through family, association through architechture, the tangible elements of the space were but only the different contact points for the people to build associations. The second reference material, - Vernacularism and Hybridity, Roshan Shakeel looks at the
“architehctural phenomenon” of the “Contemporary Urban Vernacular” that had been emerging after the 1980’s. The paper looks at the key features of the style in conversation leading futhrer to the idea of vernacular within architechture, followed by two distinct traditional and contemporary discourses of the same. Through this it iterates the play between “power” and “identity” between “ indigenous tradition and the modernity of colonialism. Other than this, Bachelard Gast’s Poetics of Space helped to dissect the emotionality and associative power of the aesthetics of a house. The singnificance of tangible and intangible elements highlighted in this book only furthered my understanding in the experience of a traveller and what home means to a traveller in a constantly shifitng world.
The third part of the private space is the bedrooms that have been mashed together to form the various associations one can have with this area of privacy. Privacy of body, thought and lifestyle choices are brought forward and culminate here to form what one considers their private spaces to be. More than being a specificity of a bedroom, the spaces is imagined as a universal space that has associations to privacy and comfort. The body of work put here is a mash up of the various tastes and choices, the three characters have made in their home and how its been recreated as a continuous stretch of private moments captured here. Although open to the public, the space allows people to only move in a single file, in a way providing the intimacy bedrooms provide and alongside not allowing complete viewership in one walk. The space manipulates viewership according to time, amount of people and direction of audience flow as the passagway can be accessed from both ends. The objects are placed haphazardly and although have a running narrative, for a first time viewer seems to be a mixture of random assortment of objects. The non-linear narative that runs through these spaces is in the form of a diary of the person who recreated this space in the first place. It is his observations, analyses and documentation that helped to build what is being viewed.
spaces. 2. There are various trigger points in this place, some more generic than the rest allows a subjective association to space. These are the varying points of contact which may or may not differ for each individual. 3.The rituals and ourity of private spaces. The idea of having to remove your shoes before entering the space is a rule been placed to access this particular site. 4. The space compressess the actual size of a room for a larger than life, overwhelming experience of this idea of the bedroom here. Although the three bedrooms do not have a seperating wall, the choices of each are distinctive yet overlap in what makes them private. The obsessions, the hoarding, the untidiness, the personal choices that do not follow rules of a public domain.
Various aspects of privacy have been touched upon in this space
The stretch of the corridor that is used here is about 80 ft * 4 ft. According to the protocol for corridor spaces, the area within this space is lefe to be a little more than 3 ft. But for the sake of the story, the corridor is cramped with objects.
1. The privacy of body and thought has been unwrapped here to make visible to the public eye, what is considered public and what is the affective quality of bringing privacy into public
The site chosen is at the corridor that leads from the entry of the Vidhan Soudha Metro near Vikas Soudha. This contradiction from a space that holds a strong public identity on the outside into a mashup of everything private facilitates an absurdity because of the choice of elements that have been brought together. The private space in itself, through the conventional movement into a house, is meant to be the last space of intervention ends up being an opening point into the rest of the fragments of the house.
The first view of the assemblage is at the platform. Here the commuter comes in contact with the cloth line. An entry point into this city/home/ personal space from the outside. Coming from another part of the city to this one, is what a traveller is experiencing in the varying identities a space holds in itself. The cloth line as a visual access that is provided in houses across the recent styles of housing, is hung there connected from end to end at the base of the concourse, hovering over the platform area. The scent of freshly washed clothes as an association to the daily laundry routine of a household is imagined to bring an acknowledgement of the use of the space as a balcony other than a platform. The clothes are a variation of the clothes worn, displayed and hidden when on the body and yet put on display in balconies, availaible for free viewership. Undergarments, expensive clothing, cheap clothing, all of it is placed here to be viewed by the commuter. As of now he doesnt know if its a random asssortment of clothes, he doesnt know who it belongs to, he doesnt know if hes just crossing it or entering a certain threshold.
The third solid point of access into a private space is the junction of the hall and the kitchen. These two are again mashed up to create an adjecent experience of association by tactile and olafactory mediums. The hall and the kitchen are spaces considered on display, it has a certain identity depending from household ot household. The particularities of smell, texture and colors holds in them the potential to transform a person from being an outsider to an insider. Because these arent created through lifestyle, they are also connected to the innate senory reactions one holds on interaction. Although these spaces look to bring in the intimacy of this particular household that has been inspired from Bangalore , it has been recreated to a larger than life combination to allow a wider associative platform. When I say larger than life, its not necessarily the size that is referenced, but also the nature and strength of triggers. The strength of smell as a trigger and the sense of tactile experiences as a trigger. Other than these three primary access points, there are various traces that will be placed through the path of these three. Each space has few common threads running through them, a sense of ritual of accessing private spaces, the intimacy(experience of intimacy) of what one considers private, subjective association(points of contact), larger than life, ( the space allows prints of a larger variety of audience to be left behind in the process making the individual only a part of the whole experience.). Time is another running thread of this space, the time piece that is placed in each of these spaces will correspond not the the actual time, but to the time of the recreation of the space i.e the time during which the writer of the diary had experienced each space. The colors used are mostly faded out, pale colors that could translate the fleeting, ephemeral nature of the reality of this private space. Pale blues and yellows dominate the spaces, with white grey following them. I have referenced a study of narayanpillai street I had done last semester for smaller scale specifics of rituals and routines of inhabited, shared spaces, also I have borrowed a more general study of the motifs and nature of hybridity of architechtural styles from the thesis paper of a fellow student on the vernacular urban architechture of Bangalore ( Roshan Shakeel, vernacularism and hybridity) . The nature of objects added to the space come from a mix of these specifics and general additions that people have been adding over time to Bangalore, which in a way allows them to be a part of and contribute to the constantly
shifting identity.