A handshake with the city:
an introduction to the city through the culture of play I. In a South Indian folktale, as recalled by A K Ramanjuan while introducing Folktales from India1, one dark night, an old woman was searching intently for something in the street. A passer-by asked her, “Have you lost something?” She answered, “Yes, I have lost my keys. I've been looking for them all evening” “Where did you lose them?” “I don’t know. Maybe inside the house.” “Then why are you looking for them here?” “Because it is dark in there. I don’t have oil in my lamps. I can see much better here, under the lights.” Ramanujan has used this parable to argue the cultural legitimacy of folktales alongside written text. In principle, until recently, most urban studies have been similarly conducted in “well-lit” spaces, in places we already know. And, as Ramanujan says, in these we have found many precious things. With our desire to explore [urban] ’play’, we are moving into a city’s proverbial “indoors” - into the expressive culture of the intimate, the fragile, the hidden and the ephemeral. There is a sustained allusion: the work of architecture be returned to the stuff of life. Not all elements, or even all of the structures of everyday life are always evident. They become part of our “habitus” as conceptualized by Pierre Bourdieu as part of the experience of lived practices. Play momentarily reveals the facade of these structures. To that extent, working with play as a methodology is akin to doing a form of archaeology. What is revealed is the enduring; a glimpse of a buried or underground river. In this, ‘play’ is difficult to capture, and is fluid in its nature. Through the practice of play, we look at revealing everyday practices fossilized by their very “everydayness”; or through sheer repetition of habit and forgotten possibilities within the built environment. Play, then, is a serious way of opening up a way of looking at cities, and those who use the cities.
1
A.K. Ramanujan. Folktales from India. Penguin Books, India. 1991.
***** “Your humanity is not strange to me” Through games, our role as a tourist, always in a hurry, always documenting but never participating actively in the local life, dissolves. We are no longer just observers; we are a part of what is going on. It even needs our presence. It could just happen to me with the presence of others. As an active participant I start to belong a little bit to the local life, and the local life starts to belong to me. Political, economic and cultural barriers no longer exist. The linguistic barrier is overlapped with the universal language of empathy, playfulness and affection, [sic.] claiming the humanity in each of us. The humanity of common space. Nothing that is human is strange to me, someone once said. And this is exactly what the city seems to be repeating to me: your humanity is not strange to me. Play activates this kind of organicity that makes us all human. And I am the collection of memories, collected in the space that I inhabit through play. I wouldn’t be that if I was just a tourist. Carol Barros (participant from Brazil) Self translated from her native Portuguese telling. “Physical memories” If somebody is pushed to play in the space, rather than make photos or videos, there is a big difference. Maybe it takes more time to play. But it will give you an opportunity to remember the shape, and beyond that, how to feel the texture. It can be soft, then you can play with it like sand. Or it can be really hard, and if you throw to this hard thing, it will come back again. Before I engaged in play, there was always this on problem - to remember the shape, details, textures of a place. So, let’s play. When you are playing, when you can touch it, feel it (the physical environment) you can understand, you can remember. You can penetrate the space, and feel it. Nursultan Nurdin Uulu (participant from Kyrgyzstan) Self translated from his native Kyrgyz telling.
II. Play in our process refers specifically to the games (traditional and contemporary, formal and spontaneous) played within the city of Ahmedabad, the test site for a recently concluded workshop2 with students of architecture. Being a vocational workshop, the participants were working with the body and the senses. The challenges, and risks, for the participants were ones of inserting themselves into the city through play. Most of the participants were encountering Ahmedabad city for the first time. The concept of play also involved practices that move in and out of more traditional and established conventions. Play, then, necessarily refers to practices that are temporary and weave around and in response to already established contexts. However, instead of referring to just a responsive context, play has the potential of going further - entering into a dialogue with the context wherein it carries the capacity of pushing the boundaries of structures, or in its more radical moment, altering these boundaries and structures. Play in our work refers to such moments, that by their very nature, have a sense of ephemerality to them. In a unique way, play has materiality - play must be enacted rather than thought about - to realize itself as play; and yet, by its very nature it is transient. It is the combination of these two conditions of play that lends its sense of ephemerality. ***** “I spy, with my little eye….” Sometimes I wonder, why is my house blue? The doors are blue, the ceiling is blue; the columns, the windows - everything is blue. It is a nice blue, like the Indian [cricket] jersey blue. But when I step out of the house and see my house from across the street, it doesn’t feel so blue. Maybe because of the white wall perpendicular to it. Or because of the orangepink house next to it. When I stand next to the iron statue and look around, it feels like I am in a canopy of colorful buildings. Cream, yellow, blue, brown, pink, orange…and colors I don’t yet know. The ‘khadki’ (street/ lane) behind me is completely white. It is peaceful there, but we can’t play I Spy there, because we need colors for the game.
2
The Archiprix International 2017. CEPT University, Ahmedabad, India. Feb 1-10, 2017.
7.30 in the evening, and it is almost dark. I would say almost, for one tube-light is lit to keep the house from total darkness. There is just enough light to recognize it, but not enough to make out the colors. So whether it blue, or grey, I cannot tell. It is funny how colors change with light, and it keeps you wondering what was the correct color. When I look for the most appropriate color, I get confused. Is it green, or grey, or blue? Sometimes, even purple can seem blue. Last night, my house looked grey from the ‘chowk’ (square). I wonder…I know it is not grey, it is blue. ‘Neela’, as they call in Hindi. Aashna Agarwal (participant from India) Language of telling: English. The telling describes playing the game ‘I Spy’ in the residential neighborhoods of Ahmedabad. ***** “The human train” The most important thing which makes the game more fun is to pay attention to how the surfaces are, how the variety of people are forming the surfaces. Often we don’t know where we go, but we know which direction we would like to go in. And it seems like the train goes through a labyrinth where human body is a barrier. And we have to find a way; find a space between the people that lets the train go between them. We need a lot of time. We find out that the way we go is ultimately not important; it is more fun to see the barrier dissolve as those people making the barriers around us join the train, and so making a path through the barrier. Eine Nuchnabe (participant from Thailand) Self translated from his native Thai telling. The telling describes the unfolding of the party game, the Human Snake, which was adapted in order to use it as a means of navigation, and to make incursions into an unfamiliar city. The game begins with two people, playing three rounds of rock-paper-scissors. The winner becomes the head of the snake and determines the direction to proceed in, and the next encounter. Each encounter is expressed through new rounds of rock-paper-scissor, where the
next ‘head’ is established. The game ends when it is determined by the group, that the game has run its course - whether by reaching a previously decided destination or through boredom, hunger, length of play, or a physical obstacle. III. Play also shares common ground with urban conditions of the threshold, the border and the boundary. In its practice of playing, and its temporality, it occupies liminal spaces. The inbetween. Games are always played within or between, with the potential of altering what is within and without. Players move into play and step out of play to close play. In its potential to transcend, subvert to cross boundaries, play reveals the possible, but also what already stands as a structure or context. Through the course of the workshop, play was sensed as an equalizer that momentarily removed the city’s natural divisions, creating ephemeral common grounds that provided participants ways of dwelling within a new urban community, its cultures and mechanics. *****
Edgard Torres (participant from Chile)
750mm x 750mm x 2500mm box. Wood frame with MDF panel. Interior lined with corrugated cardboard sheet. Exterior painted black. Audio: “Collective Orchestra�. Recordings of tellings by participants in the workshop, in their native tongues and their self-translations in English. Conducted & Arranged by Gauri Raje. Length of audio looped: 00:12:20 A mobile installation, intended to be located in multiple situations within the city. It is an attempt to reinsert the playful activities and findings of the workshop back into the city, generating briefly, a space of intimacy yet unfamiliarity. A material expression of the condition experienced by all the participants during the workshop. This installation and response was unique to the other participants. The conditions created during the workshop meant that the student’s response was mainly of observation of the conditions of play and various plays in the city, rather than of a direct experience of play in the city. IV. In working with play, and indeed playing, we were looking with the participants in our workshop at a method of meeting and encountering the city of Ahmedabad as a precursor to design. In realizing the materiality of play, it became incumbent on the participants to insert their bodies into the place of the city to play. This demand of the workshop resulted in a range of responses-from playing games in defined neighborhoods in the city to observing and engaging in playful activities that enabled access through the city and its culture. To this extent, the interaction with the city becomes extremely intimate. The process of creating intimacy is not just a matter of engaging emotions, but engaging the intelligence of the body to create memories. To this extent, we look at play as a method that transcends categories of recording, documentation, measuring and comprehending. The method of play seems to yield an archaeology of urban conditions; and make aware those hidden areas that conventional tools do not yield because they measure the measurable so far in architecture and studies of the built environment. These studies sense the immeasurable, those sensorial experiences which cannot be easily translated into analyzable verbiage/ words. The precursor to designing needs to find a method of unearthing, communicating and recording sensorial experiences and what
we seem to sense/ perceive become personal anecdotes rather than a part of a collective communicable sensed narrative of the built environment. Play is our set of tools that attempts to hold and communicate the fragile ephemeral sensorial perceptions of the built environment, which through time and repetitions of lived experience modulate and create a particular culture of a city, in this case, of Ahmedabad. Memory work has long taken note of the role of the body in remembering, and its flexibility in modulating the contours of memories over time. Creation of memories and memory work necessarily demands a certain amount of the ability to distantiate without disengaging - of capturing and storing textures and layers of events and conditions that allows these to be brought into context as conditions enable them. We look at this subjectivity and fluidity of memory work as a strength. Approaching memory work in this manner may allow complexities to emerge in context, rather than attempting to freeze their fluidities in the so far accepted modes of documentation. However, this also involves creating a large amount of trust in the body to hold layers and textures in all its complexity. We look at play as a tool that responds to the demands of creating this trust, and as a way of opening a possibility to finding new languages of expression of complexity in time, space and materiality. This process of encountering and recording becomes relevant in play work, to the extent that cities are similar. Studies for long time have noted the complex nature of cities, always striving to find a language that can bring more and more of the complexity to light. We, however, argue that this may be an impossible task since it may be that complexity can only be revealed through partially bringing it into light. The transient nature of play may be well suited to this task of giving a glimpse and therefore bringing into partial light, in this sense. And through this, allowing the player a glimpse into the more enduring structures and processes of cultures of cities and urban conditions therein. This attitude also necessarily requires a shift in attention and intention from a solution-focused nature of research, documentation or indeed, knowing, and focusing instead on meeting and a beginning to understand conditions that may not seem immediately personal, but nevertheless demand the insertion of the body to enable them to emerge into a condition. A city culture does not become a city by its inhabitants observing it, but by people living in it and inserting their bodies into it, for longer or shorter durations. It is in the conscious immersion
into such a space that a dialogic understanding can begin to emerge of a collective culture of a place, a method that we choose to call 'the sense of place’. Our effort here is to create a method for what has been long accepted as valid sensorial observations and narratives of moments of cultural experience to be translated into being part of the language of documentation instead of being relegated to the realm the esoteric 3.
3
Concerning the porosity and malleability of disciplinary boundaries that mark inclusions and exclusions in architecture, cities and the built environment, and their strategic significance, we refer here to the discussions by Gulsum Baydar Nalbantoglu in 1) Toward Postcolonial Openings: Rereading Sir Banister Fletcher's "History of Architecture�. Assemblage No. 35, 2) Beyond Lack and Excess: Other Architectures/Other Landscapes. Journal of Architectural Education (1984-),Vol. 54, No. 1 (Sep., 2000), pp. 20-27