Review

A Matter of People

‘Informal Cities,’ an exhibition addressing the issues of the people living within the informal cities within the urban centres, organised in association with Swedish Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm and the Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), was held at Coomaraswamy Hall, at the Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalay (Prince of Wales Museum), in Mumbai recently. Art writer Dr. Vaishali Sharma takes a look at the event and issues highlighted through it.

Much of the Twenty-first Century urban world squats in squalor. The cities of the future, rather than being made of glass and steel, as envisioned by earlier urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks and scrap wood. According to UN-HABITAT there are nearly one billion slum dwellers in the world. India is home to 63 per cent of all slum-dwellers in South Asia. And there is no city in the country with as large a proportion of its residents living in slums, officially put at 54 per cent people, as in Mumbai (a global slum capital). The situation becomes scary when it is estimated that Indian slums continue to grow 250 per cent faster than overall population.(1) “If such a trend continues unabated,” warns planning expert Gautam Chatterjee, “we will have only slums and no cities.”(2) No one knows whether such gigantic concentrations of poverty are biologically or ecologically sustainable. Is the world ready to do something about it?

“I will give you a talisman.
Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find doubts and yourself melt away.”
----Mahatma Gandhi (Last Phase, Vol.II, 1958, P.65).

But what can be done, when in today’s urban environment the inhabitants of informal cities are conveniently made into invisible creatures? They are invisible to other citizens and often invisible to mayors and government authorities. They are also invisible in the city as informal vendors, street cleaners or shop attendants. For the city, they exist only as performers of services and consumers. Their living circumstances are of no relevance. Slums can be found coexisting in the central part of the city, but you never have to drive through them. A very important component of this ‘invisibility factor’ is that slums receive few outside visitors – professional politicians in search of votes, emissaries of slum landlords and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). A mayor from an important city of the global North, after his first visit to an African slum, remarked that the relative lack of interest of the international community would change radically “if only they saw this.”

Yet, indifference is not by any means the worst of possible situations. Things get much worse when city authorities or investors and speculators set their sights on inner-city areas inhabited by slum dwellers. In these circumstances, the invisibility curtain dissolves. All of a sudden, they are there, in plain view, with their shack, dirty paths, stinking piles of garbage, streams of open sewage, clogged latrines, and their naked children. They are now visible, but what people and decision makers see is an eyesore, an offence to the city. What was conveniently ignored until now suddenly becomes an intolerable situation that must be put right. The slum will be replaced by a shopping centre, or a modern residential complex, or give way to that highway planned long ago whose need has become patently evident now and cannot be positioned anywhere except in the slum area. This is when, usually, an eviction order is issued and carried out. The slum dwellers are forced to set up camp elsewhere in the city. The ‘problem’ remains; the circumstances of the displaced slum dwellers become, if at all possible, worse. This is not exactly a paragon of the urban development we would like to see.

All this description can clearly and loudly be read in the works exhibited at Coomaraswamy Hall, Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai, in association with Swedish Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm and SPARC in Mumbai. The exhibition, ‘Informal Cities,’ paired with seminars has attempted to document the voices of these people living in informal settlements and provide them a platform to speak. It punctures the notion of slum as an eyesore. This project proposes to look at slum not as a problem but as a solution. It demonstrates that informal cities, though unplanned, are highly organised structures, operating within a different logic than that of the formal city.  Out of unhealthy and crowded environments can emerge cultural movements and levels of solidarity unknown in the suburbs of the rich. It reveals that against all odds, slum dwellers have developed economically rational and innovative shelter solutions for themselves. It suggests that perhaps, future social and economic models can be found in the contemporary informal cities.

This project curated by Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Anna Erlandson, Maria Lantz and Michele Masucci, is in fact an outcome of the research made by twelve artists and architects from Stockholm together with SDI Federations in the slums of Rio, Sao Paulo, Durban, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Manila, Lilongwe and Blantyre. The project aimed to interrogate urban growth, especially manifested in informal cities of the poor in the global south. The panel discussions paired with the exhibition included people from grass-root organisations, development specialists, architects, artists, and inhabitants of the community themselves. The gatherings created an extra-institutional, discursive, and relational space for interrogating the topic. By allowing the voice of the informal to speak, the project aimed to build an inclusive space for negotiation and communication, one that exists outside the traditional contexts of contemporary art and architecture. Consequently, it raised questions concerning ethics of representation, political content and aesthetic value in the communication of these individual perspectives and thereby the political effect of artistic practice.

The research also led to the publishing of a book on Asia’s largest slum, ‘DHARAVI: Documenting Informalities,’ in 2008. The book reveals thriving communities, innovative architecture, and powerful grass-root politics. By moving beyond abstract concepts such as globalisation and post-colonialism, the book gives detailed personal accounts of many ways in which we are all linked to Dharavi’s people and industries.(3)

The exhibition comprised of films, sound, drawings, photographs, and other forms of documentation from the sites. Storytelling has been the keyword. For instance, ‘No sari sari only sorry sorry,’ a photographic installation along with the text by Anna Erlandson, narrates a story of a vulnerable community that is forcedly evicted from their settlement under the bridge at Mindanao Avenue, Philippines and forced to face hardships to find livelihood. The title is taken from the laconic statement, “here is no sari sari only sorry sorry,” made by the women after relocation. ‘Sari Sari,’ are the informal street vendor’s stalls mostly selling cheep candy, soda and street food, and is a common livelihood for many women in the slums of Manila. This ethnographic work exposes the government’s lack of responsibility in the process of resettlement of slum dwellers.

Francesco Jodice’s film installation, ‘Sao Paulo City tellers,’ investigates the phenomenon of self-organisation in megacities. It recounts unimaginable stories, places, and people which are the forerunners of new ways of life. One of these stories elaborates on the fear of abduction, aggression, and violence, which prompted the richer classes to use helicopters as taxis. The city of 18 million inhabitants is therefore disseminated by an excess of helipads, from which 23,000 flights take off and land per week, transporting people to work, school, shops and church. It demonstrates the evolution of living in the 21st century. Though only a part of this larger series was displayed in the exhibition, yet it brings us closer to the distant world of Sao Paulo, Brazil. As far as the technique is concerned, the project alternates between documentary and visual narrative. Jodice shoots in a ‘film noir’ style; dark, dense tones coupled with solar images in a panoramic format create a unique cinematography.(4)

‘Portraits from Above,’ by Rufina Wu & Stefan Canham is a technically outstanding documentation of Hong Kong's informal rooftop communities that provides us a thorough investigation of these structures. Through detailed architectural drawings, photographs and texts, the otherwise invisible informal societies on the rooftops of one of the world’s largest cities can be understood as an integral part of the city and also creates empathy for their situations.

Johan Rutherhagen’s site-specific installation, ‘Moving too fast in the wrong direction,’ that looks like an interstice in the wall of the gallery is actually a result of the mankind’s exploitation of finite resources.  It is a graph drawn on the wall of the gallery showing statistics and hard facts on souring CO2 levels as a consequence of urbanisation and industrialisation.

Monika Marklinger’s digital prints titled, ‘To Dharavi,’ displayed across the gallery space, is an attempt of the artist to intertwine her own individual language with the reproducible expressions of the society. By challenging the implicit claims for veracity in photographs through her drawings, Monika blurs the limit between documentation and fictitious representation, creating new outlooks on informal society that host both hopelessness and dreams.

Maria Lantz’s large-format photographs collectively titled as ‘Informalities,’ reveal places beyond formal structure where refugees, dwellers, workers, nomads and dreamers gather. She has captured alternative scenes of informal structures from all over the world.  The images portray stigmatised and yet tempting, law-less but controlled, poor. Whether it is the image of Mumbai’s Dhobi Ghat or informal market of Indonesia or favela of Rio de Jeniriro or that of Embezo – grass root meeting for better housing in South Africa, her images bring up both negative and positive sides of the informal structures; they can mean violence and dictatorship but also hard struggles, deep democracy, pride, and possibilities.

‘Getwakera, Kibera,’ a film-installation by Erik Rosshagen and David Herdies is an interesting ride into one of the most crowded places on earth. One camera moves along railway tracks that run through Kibera, one of the largest shanty-towns in Africa, and another shows sections from the shoot – displaying the environment outside the frame. There are also several soundtracks. “Through interviews, facts and people’s personal stories, we find out more about the location, exposing the juxtaposition of abstract expertise and lived experiences,” explains the artist.

‘Informal/Illegal settlements of the Djinn,’ an installation by Johan Widen is an interesting collection of drawings, photographs and paintings from informal, perhaps secret and invisible settlements of Djinn in Middle East. Widen’s work attempts to convey the atmosphere of these places on a more existential level. His stories confront artist’s studio v/s outside views.

‘Fragments from Dharavi,’ is a film installation by Michele Masucci and Sofia Wiberg. This documentation takes us through the alleys of Dharavi at the heart of Mumbai. Accompanied by the voices of experts and guided by two workers of the organisation, Mahila Milan (Women Together), the artists take us through the rich variety of activities taking place in the area.

Thus, it can be seen that the most compelling thing about this whole project is that it involved a process that itself is a collective act of deliberation and cooperation between participants from the slum communities and those from diverse professional fields, joining the artistic practice to the goals of action research in community development. It also tried to understand the memories and emotions that surround a community, using art’s historic ability to attend to the affective realm of local knowledge to find out how people feel about where they are. At the same time, it makes use not only of art’s affective function but also of contemporary art’s critical function, its tendency to ask questions and to see otherwise, to ask often impertinent questions of why the world is shaped as it is – and to wonder how it might be shaped differently. With ‘Informal Cities,’ the personal moment of the aesthetic encounter simultaneously produces an expanded moment of social and political encounter. The local and the systemic, the compassionate and the ironic, the micro and the macro, the artistic and the social are brought into a scene of reciprocal reflection.  

References

1. Arif Hassan, ‘Introduction,’ in Akhtar Hameed Khan, Orangi Pilot Project:
2. Reminiscences and Reflections, Karachi 1996, P.xxxiv.
3. Gautam Chatterjee, ‘Consensus versus Confrontation,’ Habitat Debate June 2002, P.11.
4. ‘DHARAVI: Documenting Informalities,’ 2008, www.informalcities.org
5. Francesco Jodice, ‘Sao Paulo City tellers,’ http://www.videoartworld.com/beta/video_152.html.

(Dr. Vaishali Sharma is an anthropologist and art writer, living and working in Mumbai. Email: vaishaliindia@rediffmail.com)