Yasmin road

Heading towards an unknown area of Dharavi in the night to examine the activities and flows of a street might not be such a good idea. We all had the feeling of insecurity raised by the first sight of our street, Yasmin Road.This area seemed not only more precarious in a certain way, but also the attitude of the people was different, more hostile. Or perhaps they expressed their awareness and curiosity in a more hostile way then we were used to.Anyway, the research in the night was not recomendable, since the behaviour of especially children and men made it difficult to focus on the work without being rude.I still can't completely put my finger on it, but would really want to know why. We wanted to map the activities of people related to entrances and streets of Yasmin Road, aswell the division made by activities of the pavement itself.Interesting was that ON the street, houses, shacks and little shops were build, and most of them not for temporal reasons.On a certain part of the street, were social housing ruled in vertical way, little shacks have been placed against their walls, like a kind of weed.A beautifull example of the changeabillity of space that has a particular function, but will become in a way multifunctional.The type of changeability can be temporal or cyclic. Someplace else on Yasmin Road for instance, the market stables, actually more cloth on the street, transformed during day in big brown packs, marking the pavement for the night, when they would unfold them again.

just a thought

Today I saw one of those places above your imagination. You try to picture a certain situation or place with knowledge and the fantasy you have, and you discover that it's out of your league. The world you predicted to know has enlarged once again. This time it was a dark labyrinth, completely inside the fortress of brick constructed houses, where you have to guess what is a street or not, and wanders where light would start to shine again. Small streets, sometimes some stone plates over the watersystem, crossing and cutting each other, leading to places you can't foretell. The presence of little lit shops and people walking through confirms the fact that this kind of infrastructure isn't private, but at the same time evokes such an intimacy that I cannot call it public either. I remembered that during the lecture ' streets' by Valerio Franzone he emphasized the vitality of the street, and it's character of not being a void but something 'massive'. I cannot say that the streets I described above were masive or a void; they were both at the same time. Cutted inside a massive block of brick, they seem empty. But inside those streets, life filled them with mass.

Far far away...

Cut through

Turning, turning around and back and forth, inside a labyrinth dominated by blackish smoke and penetrating suffocating smell. Women and men working hard in the heat spread by big self made ovens, where pots are baking inside a cotton cocoon. Open spaces filled up by pots, cley puddles, ovens and people; mind your steps! In narrow streets, people pass each other without touching, yelling or excusing, demanding in a gracious way their body space. Even the old woman over there, sitting on the border between street and open space, varnishing pots, is aware of her body and the space she occupies; with dignity but without the feeling to obstruct, simply because she already posesses this particular place. No running or rushing inside the labyrinth, still going strong in the time it takes, not trying to change it. A Rembrandt or Caravaggio would be estonished by the marevellous play of light, embedded in this somehow surrealistic decor, that seems to be disconnected with modern life so close by.

curiosity and fears: the pictures

curiosity and fears

The understanding of an urban body inside an urban body has different approaches.One of them is to find and understand the border of the two; where one stops and the other starts. Obviously that is not always an easy task, since there exist multiple relations that interweve and combine. Exploring the border by means of senses is a delicate question. After all, senses are personal and time based.Another difficulty is the new environment itself; with a possibe different culture, structure and geographic scenery. Smell, sight, vibes and sound of the boundary of Dharavi would be explored and notated and by means of GPS even located. With two students of JJ school, Richa and Pooja, Alejandra and me kicked of our exploration of Dharavi. Senses in general evoke a certain reaction, mainly expressed by body language. To me, it was very interesting to see and register the behaviour and body language of the group, evoked by the environment. Perhaps a cultural, perhaps personal; some differences in reaction and behaviour between the Indian students and Alejandra became more present during time.Where Alejandra was drawing sketches of the border and it's striking images with curiosity and enthusiasm, the Indian students acted towards the situation with a distance and sometimes fear in a to me gracefull way. Sometimes they even reacted on the open attitude of me and Alejandra, warning us to be precautious or the necessity to change behaviour towards confrontations with the locals.Time and the time of day, played an important role here. Exporing the border made me even more curious to what was happening inside Dharavi, since one is only able to peak and grasp.Later that day, after getting lost from the given route and not willing to walk over the railway track, we finally entered Dharavi in the afternoon, trying to stay close as much as possible to the border.It became clear that also inside Dharavi, borders exist. Sometimes spatially, sometimes socially or even physically, not always visible or lucid. Inside this tissue, people payed more attention to us and our behaviour then outside on the borders, where the atmosphere was completely different. Especially when we stopped to take pictures or made drawings, the area around us suddenly filled with curious people, causing sometimes congestion of the place. The intensity of curious people was much higher then I ever experienced myself, that perhaps had to do with the fact that the people here were not informed about our presence and reason. The dawn entered quickly, erasing every trace that could help us to continue our route. Anxiety started to emerge, since the reaction and behaviour of the people started to change somehow, trapped in a web without a map. Till we met Shiva, somehow able to transform the atmosphere and my feelings inmediately with his calm and wise personality.With his help, we've managed to find our way out of Dharavi.

Nightbleat

Arriving in a 'black hole' again; it's probably not a coincidence that every new world I've seen starts with the dark night, enable to give me more then some clues, but stimulates thoughts and imagination. In this case, I started to fret about the work that had to be done in relation with this sensitive and perhaps even fragile environment, and how we could try to establish a kind of balance. Of course , we are not the first group of candidates that invade Dharavi, looking, mapping and asking, perhaps even pushing to receive the desired information. What effect, vision or influence would they have left on it's habitants, and how would they react on us; 'guru ' ? There is so much you want to know about their situation, but how can you get satisfied, without leaving them behind empty? Without the feeling or even fact that they also gained something? In my country, and probably in many others, we have this phrase that says; only for nothing, the sun will shine. The habitants of Dharavi will not differ when it comes to the essence of this phrase. The question will be what they will ask. Or perhaps I should start thinking what I have to offer, what I can give to them to maintain that precious balance.

Love at first sight....

From the airport completely packed and stacked inside a mutated english cab to our Indian home at the border of Mumbai's new dazzling hotspot; Dharavi. Heavy dust filled warm air swarms around the cab, bringing new exciting and strange perfumes to me. Weak streetlights and flickering little stars reveal in a humble way pieces of this oriental delight. Oh daylight, I beseech you to run towards the sky to illuminate this new world that I desperately need to explore............

Cover Kolkata guide

Kolkata case

Kolkata, a city of joy to Indians, for us a city of dispair. Making a toeristic guide about slums in this mega city wasn't an easy task. Time passed by looking for information and maps that could make this black hole understandable and explainable. Deeper and deeper in the spiderweb, trying to unfold it's structure and reason. Then Newtons apple hit us, illuminating the idea of total absence of structures and rules as a focusing point. In peace with the facts, we actually managed to clearify a certain part of Kolkata, without losing it's main striking character. Even in the presentation, the chaotic aspect of Kolkata unintendedly ruled our explanations and elucidations. A relief that there's the guide, our guide, to clearify any confusion......

Mapping smell at Papsouwselaan

Biomapping in Delft

smell, sound, sight, sense; exploring the environment like a baby.Even more like a blind man or deaf-mute, since some senses are disabled. How would they experience streets, parks, highways, sites etc ? Christian Nold showed maps of certain urban areas made by human senses, in wich the conventional understanding of mapping an area is turned upside down.They show a humane approach and understanding towards what is mapping actually about, and what should be their goal.The method is called bio mapping, refering to our human senses as a powerfull tool for mapping. After some inspiration and contemplation we headed to the Papsouwselaan, where we asked several people to participate in a little investigation about smell. The aim was to derive places of interest along a 300 meter strip with only the aid of smell. Participants had to wear sound- blocking headphones and a blindfold in order to be completely focused on smell alone. The smell had to be judged by intensity and type; a good and pleasant or bad and horrible. Some people were looking strange at us, as if we wanted to rob them with an original but easy way, and refused to cooperate. Others were very curious, and discovered not only that they had a different idea about the environment before participating in the experiment, but also the power of their smell sense when all other senses are blocked. We placed the results in seperate schemes, showing the intensity and type of smell along the strip. We also brought all the results of the different participants in one map, that shows the strip and it's experience in general. The day of our experiment was very windy and cold; what would be the result when it would be a warm and windfree one ? Some smells were very volatile; are they always there, or was it just temporarily? These and other questions become important if one has the intention to make a trustfull map about a certain area using bio mapping.

"The difference between what we do and what we could do would suffice to solve most of the world's problems"

Gandhi