67 Sites

When invited to be part of this workshop inside an art school in Bangalore, I proposed to the faculty about my idea of a workshop within a workshop and the possibility of a collaborative project with the students. Since I was an outsider and did not know Bangalore, students proposed to take me outside the campus to see what would emerge from exploring the city together. While going from one place to another by following the road map everyone realized that one could not avoid noticing and discussing the fast changing Bangalore and its massive construction sites. The material found or used for construction in each area clearly indicated the different socio - economic strata of the population of the city.

In the process we began collecting pieces of stones, concrete, wood, iron, plaster of Paris, clay, burnt wood, bricks, tin and asbestos sheets etc. used in different kinds of construction. The process got little more organized by jotting down the names of the sites we visited every day. At the end of a week we had been to 67 sites. Back on campus with 67 bags of found and collected material, a map of the city and a list of sites, we systematically placed the bags on the floor to investigate the nature of material before installing by suspending the pieces from a grill found in the junk yard of the college installed between two trees by keeping enroute of the 67 sites we had visited. Each piece had an aluminum strip tied on with a name of the site engraved on it, like a research tag, for the viewer to know in which part of Bangalore it had been found. Our intention was that the process of seeing becomes engaging for the viewer interested in finding about the names of various places in Bangalore and as said earlier the socio - economic strata of different areas of the city.

For me and the students the process of exploring the city from the outside (as we did not really engage with people from any of those 67 sites) encouraged a dialogue between us and for me it was very interesting to understand my collaborators approach and views on the city they lived in, as in most cases, they took the decisions to take me to particular areas they thought to be significant.