Soil on paper, collected from the Dharavi community in Mumbai, 2016.
In August 2016, I was invited to Piramal Art Residency in Mumbai, India. For the first time from a birds-eye view, I saw the chaotic settlements in Dharavi.
With all my curiosity, during my stay in Mumbai, I took a tour with a local tour guide. A young man from Dharavi guided me to understand his land in his territory. He explained the neighborhood was founded during the British colonial era. Today it is home to almost one million people and with an area of just over 2.1 square km, it is also one of the most densely populated places. Most of the population migrated from poor rural areas to urban Mumbai.
My research started with a sound map of Dharavi. As I walked by the narrow and wide lanes I can hear the transitions and blends of the languages from Marathi to Hindi, Tamil to Bhojpuri, Gujrati to aamchi Mumbai. I started asking the locals how and when did they decide to leave their home to exchange it with life in a big metropolitan city? How are they dealing with questions of their identity, memories, with they unsettle settlements, health, and between religious conflict and peaceful co-existence? Many questions remained as a question only and unsolved.
I started engaging with the people slowly, visited them, had interviews, and started collecting soil from some of their homes. Back in the studio, I started processing these soil samples to make pigments which I used to paint for my drawings. Like this, each small section of Dharavi I visited, each house, whose inhabitants I met was represented in its own, individual color shade. understand the importance of soil in their diverse settlement. I preferred to paint the unplanned architecture of their homes rather than their life. The work on my drawings had a performance like quality and I experienced the free-flowing growth of settlements on my paper like a growing Fungus. Looking from a bird’s eye view and walking inside the narrow dark lanes between their houses made me realize and feel the pain of migration and the uprooting of lives.