Sarako

Introduction

Sarai’s focuspoint ‘CityLives’ caught my interest. The idea that a city is a dynamic structure, changing its identiy every moment, is something I can connect to. Depending on your perspective, your time and place of visit, you see a complete different identity of a city. And according to Calvino (Invisible Cities), the season and geographic direction of your entrance may give you a complete different picture of the same city.
Coming in wintertime, with almost no information about Delhi’s infrastructure or inhabitants, I will enter the city with a very curious view, from a very Western background.

With ‘Living Space ‘ I would like to provide visual information to form the a different entering point of the city of Delhi and to establish links among seemingly disparate practices of everyday life.
[See: http://www.sarai.net/citylives/citylives.htm ]

Context

I’m very interested in the different spaces – within a city – where people live in. Blockbuildings, skyscrapers, flats to villa’s, cardboard boxes, trailers, tents or temporary tunnels; different architecture which marks the boundaries of a ‘home’.

It’s not the outside of these ‘creations’ where I’m interested, but the inside. How do they create – (un)consciously – an environment where they feel at home? Which circumstances [economical / social] decide the ’shape’ of a living space? Sometimes architecture – in a case of a blockbuilding or flat – forces people to design/decorate their ’space’ in a certain way. In Europe and especially in Holland, you see whole similar neighbourhoods designed and sold by big corporations. A neighbourhood is designed for a certain ‘role-model’ (p.e. young working couples without children) that fits the required economical and social status which is necessary to live there.

A lot of times people are economically/socially forced to create their own ‘living space’ in between existing buildings, under a bridge or in the ‘unstructured’ perifery of the city. These more or less ‘temporary’ spaces are spontaneously built and completely dependant on the available material on the moment of construction. But, in both described – maybe extreme – situations, people individualize their ‘homes’;though for complete different reasons.

Delhi is completely new to me. For so far I haven’t read too much about the structure of the city or what kind of people live where and why. I imagine it to be very chaotic with huge social and economic differences. Besides these factors, I am curious if there is any influence of religion, sexe, and the Indian tradition of the kast-system on people’s living spaces. A lot of questions of which most of them probably stay unanswered, since I won’t have a scientific approach.

Execution of idea

I would like to photograph different living spaces in Delhi, from the inside. By using the resources of Sarai, I will visit houses of people with variable socio-economical backgrounds in different parts of the city. Two photographs will be made, one of the interior of their living space and one portrait of the inhabitants. Although I intend to present the photographed spaces without the comination of the inhabitants, I am interested in documenting this process. (In the end it might turn out that only the combination of both inhabitants and their living spaces work, and I want to avoid the lack of material.) By means of a very easy questionaire which they have to fill in – anonymously or not – I collect information about their personal ‘housing’-situation, to support my visual ‘research’.

Presentation

The collected material will be presented at the end of my residence. The process of my ‘research’ will be shown online. If you take a look at an earlier project called ‘Karosta-project’ (http://karosta.edworks.net) you see an example of the documentation of a process; something similar (text / image) I would like to do during my stay in Delhi.

On the form of the final presentation I haven’t decided yet. This could vary from photographic prints, to lightboxes, posters or projections, or a combination of media. I would like to embed the presentation into a public space if possible, but this needs to be discussed with SARAI.

Technical info

I plan to shoot with a 35mm / 6 x 6 mechanical camera. Colour negative film.
The webinterface to show the process of the work will be hosted by sarako.net on the domain http://blog.sarako.net. [I plan to finish this before my departure to Delhi]
All digitized material I would like to add to the CityLives project.

Additional info

I am very open to collaborate with other local visual artists, anthropologists, social scientists etc. on this project. Any suggestions/help from locals is welcome.