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.