NAVEEN MAHANTESH +0918095893826 Architect | Urban Designer Bangalore | India naveen.mahantesh@gmail.com ______________________________________________________________________________________________

Naveen Mahantesh’s practice lies at the intersection of art, architecture and the city. He is involved in creative research with a love for urban life. His past projects includes, working with teams of artists and curators and engaging with ideas of placing art in the public realm while considering the city as a studio. His projects provide alternate perspectives for the banal routines, take inspiration from urban myths, and engage within the ecologies that the city thrives upon. Naveen Mahantesh (born in 1985) is the principal architect of CRESARC based in Bangalore. His projects and propositions have been a part of Sarai-Reader-Exhibition'09(2013) and Insert (2014), curated by Raqs media collective; Mediating Modernities (2013) at Srushti School of Design; design for change at TEDx-R.V.Vidyaniketan (2013), Bangalore; and FOA-FLUX-art|life|technology Symposium at Swissnex (2015). He received a grant from KHOJ (2013) for his collaborative project Ecologies of the excess, and as part of 080:30, he received a grant from India Foundation for the Arts - Project560-Found space(2014) project that intimately situated art within the fabric of Bangalore City. He has been a City as Studio fellow(2013) at Sarai-CSDS., and a Visiting Faculty and critic for architectural design at design institutes in Bangalore including R.V School of Architecture and SIT, Tumkur. His recent talks include a presentation at the Washington Project for Arts; Washington DC, The department of Cultural Affairs for Arlington County (2015) and International Studio for Curatorial Practices, New York City.

EDUCATION 01.2011 Master of Architecture and Urban Design | PRATT INSTITUTE, Brooklyn, New York. Graduate with Cum Laude honors | GAUD Student merit Scholarships was awarded. 07.2008 Bachelor of Architecture | School of Architecture, RVCE, Bangalore. Graduate with honors and distinction. 06.2003 Pre-University College | Jain College – JGI, Bangalore. CREATIVE PRACTICE 05.2015 – 08.2015 Curator-in-residence at International Studio for Curatorial Practices, Brooklyn, New York 01.2014 – 07.2014 Project Grant awarded as part of 080:30 collective by India Foundation for Arts for the

‘PROJECT 560 - Found Spaces’ 07.2014 – 12.2015 Architecture Design Faculty at BMS school of Architecture 01.2014 Project “When a tree falls in the forest”, selected for INSERT 2014 exhibition and

publication for ‘Re-imagining the question of Cultural Infrastructure’ category. 2013 – 2014 Architecture Design Faculty at S.I.T Tumkur 04.2013 – 08.2012 Project Grant awarded for the project “Ecologies of the Excess” as part of the Negotiating routes – Ecologies of the byways program by KHOJ. http://khojworkshop.org/project/12354 | www.ecologiesoftheexcess.com 10.2012 – 02.2013 Fellow at SARAI CSDS (www.sarai.net) for the program City as Studio. The work

produced was part of the SARAI READER 09 – The exhibition. 2011 – 2014 Architectural Design Faculty at R.V.School of Architecture

12.2011 “Adventures of a Narcoleptic flanuer” – Exhibition at J.N.U, New Delhi with Srajana

Kaikini. 09.2011 – current Partner Architect, Cresarc Architects, Bangalore.

Design development, design management and execution, business development and networking.

01.2011 - 03.2011 Architect/Urban designer, Thread collective, Brooklyn, New York. www.threadcollective.com

Thread collective is an award winning, licensed architecture studio in Brooklyn, NY. In addition to architecture, our services include urban design, landscape architecture, and sustainability consultation. They work on a range of scales and building typologies with a budget range from $300,000 to $20 million. As the only employee at the time, I worked closely with the principals on the following two projects. An invited competition to develop a part of Long Island City, Queens NY. The area had considerable population of artists centered around Noguchi Museum. The objective of the competition was to explore ways of development based on a art/cultural premise rather than a builder/developer one.

06.2010 - 08.2011 Principal Architect, Design Factory 24, Surat/ Mumbai/ Bangalore. TALKS/EXHIBiTIONS/RECOGNITION 2015 Talk on placing art in public at ISCP, Brooklyn - NYC, Washington Project for Arts – Washington DC and Department of Cultural Affairs, Arlington County, Arlington. 2014 Grant awarded as part of 080:30 collective by India Foundation for arts. 2013 Awarded the Grant for the project ‘Ecologies of the Excess’ as part of the Negotiating

routes:Ecologies of the byways Part IV, by KHOJ. 2013 Speaker at the TEDx conference at R.V. College of Engineering, themed ‘design for

change’. http://www.tedxrvvidyaniketan.com/speakers.php 2013 Presented the project “EXIT SIGNAGE” as part of the ‘mediating maternities’ event at

Sristi School of design. 2012 Fellowship at SARAI CSDS as part of City as Studio. Part of SARAI READER

EXHIBITION 09. 2009 Awarded scholarship to the Master program in Urban Design at PRATT Institute, New

York 2009 Represented School of architecture, RVCE in Charles Correa Gold Medal Award Competition, Mumbai, India. 2009 Presented the thesis project on invite at Kurula Varkey design forum at CEPT, e Ahmedabad, India. 2008 Thesis project selected as one of the 10 best thesis projects in the year by NIASA, Council of Architecture. www.niasa.org 2008 Award for academic excellence in thesis, School of Architecture, RVCE. 2008 South Zone Winner, NIASA thesis Competition conducted by Council of Architecture. 2006 Selected candidate for the foreign exchange program, TRILOKA in Colombo,Sri Lanka. www.triloka.de The exchange program was between three schools; School of Architecture, RVCE, India and University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka and University of Muenster, Germany.

#PlaylistAsProposition

Kristina Matousch – http://www.kristinamatousch.com/

Bastian Muhr – http://www.bastianmuhr.de/

Dex Fernandes – http://dexfernandez.blogspot.com/

RAQS Media Collective - http://raqsmediacollective.net

Wala Collective – https://walacollective.wordpress.com/

Mohan Kumar Thangaraj - mohanskill@gmail.com

Naveen Mahantesh

naveen.mahantesh@gmail.com

W w w . E c o l o g I e s o f t h e e x c e s s . W o r d p r e s s . C o m

# in-situ mapping # ruralisation # excessive-ecologies

N a v e e n m a h a n t e s h | a n k I t b h a r g a v a | s r a j a n a k a I k I n i

ECOLOGIES OF THE EXCESS - 2013 Ecologies of the byways IV – KHOJ Naveen Mahantesh | Ankit Bhargava | Srajana Kaikini

Site + Context

Amaravathi village – About 426Kms from Bangalore, Karnataka. Local Narrative Rearing cattle has been an integral practice in the rural Indian household since history. If not for profitable large scale cattle farming, rearing an individual cattle within a household has been part of the local routine. The milk from the cow is used for household purposes and the cow dung is used for plastering walls, floors and making dried cakes that is used as cooking fuel. Small mounds of cow dung are also used by the local people as idols for worship during Dasara. In September 2012, we came across an event that denoted a shift in local ecology that impacted this practice. There was an apparent deficit of cow-dung in the village, to fulfill the rituals on the day of Ayudha Puja. There was a line of people waiting outside on one of the household with cattle, waiting for the cow to drop its dung. Cow-dung was no longer a local material, but a borrowed resource. This narrative raised many questions about the shifting ecologies at the grass root level and there was a need to acknowledge this shift.

Project + Process Census, Map, Museum – Census is a tool to enumerate and categorically place empirical information on the ledger. Benedict Anderson in his much discussed essay titled ‘Census, Map, Museum’ [Imagined Communities, Verso , 1983] saw the Census as one of the three forces of infiltration from the colonizers. About the census he says, “These ‘identities’, imagined by the (confusedly) classifying mind of the colonial state, still awaited a reification which imperial administrative penetration would soon make possible.[..] The fiction of the census is that everyone is in it , and that everyone has one- only one- extremely clear place. No fractions.” In other words, Anderson, rightly from his context of writing, saw this logic of quantification as an institutionalizing force. In-situ mapping - Statistical data gave us the vocabulary to understand the relationship between the total number of households in the village and number of cattle within them. We designed a notational system for the village that can denote which houses had cattle, which houses did not have cattle, which houses used milk from neighboring households that reared cattle and which of the houses used packaged milk, the advent of plastic. We engaged a local team of three 19year old boys to conduct this survey. We made three seals to denote the above mentioned criteria with shoe soles that were bought locally. The seals were carved out by an artist-collaborator on this project, Suresh Kumar. Along with generating the numbers/ratio of the number of households and cattle, we stamped each of the houses to depict the condition. While the book collected the numbers, the houses adorned a stamp. Each stamp was distinct in form and color and denoted a certain position from the census book. In this process, the team of three boys became statisticians, cartographers and artists at the same time. The process found complete penetration with 515 houses. There was collection of data, and representation of it, In-situ. The social fabric of the village became the layout of the museum which provided the narrative of the households and the cattle, with the stamps as the points of interest. If census, map and museum are considered as separate institutionalizing forces of a social structure, “In-situ mapping” collapsed the distinction and highlighted a social condition as data, cartography and experience.

Residue The cow stamping exercise now forces us to re-consider ways of taking stock of a social condition. The next step is to perhaps test this strategy by inverting this ‘urbanisation’ story by a ‘ruralisation’ story. What happens when emperical data is mutated, multiplied and allowed to disappear? What happens when folklore takes over facts, and mythologies become means of stock taking? The cow trail reveals another story of a circle of sustenance being broken by the external ‘progressive’ factors penetrating the ecology of Amaravathi. In other words, an Agro-based ecology , is strained at certain exit nodes , and pushed into an endless spiralling path which only accelerates under certain urbanising forces , without any forces to contain the spiral into loop back in. A question to ponder upon.

“A spiral is a point in search of an end?”

CITY AND NARRATIVES080:30

080:30 >> Playlist of propositions

Naveen Mahantesh

PROLOGUE A hashtag is a tool for accessing multiple threads on common topic on the internet and generating new ones. It is both an archival and a proposition. Each of 080:30’s interventions positions a ‘hashtag’ on the site, acknowledging the local archeology and opening up its possibilities. The 080:30 collective has become a wormhole that connects multiple dimensions of the city and a loophole that bypasses conventional perceptions of a place with art.

“Pipe is not an object” Site : Kalarasa Art Gallery #Gallery #Non-objectArt

The soundtrack of James Bond is playing in the background and a man wearing a coat and dark sun-glasses has a big brown box in his hand. He travels around the city with it and by the looks of it, is part of some covert operation transporting something valuable. He enters the room where everyone is sitting and waiting for events to unfold. The man opens the huge box, finds an onion and auctions it to the awaiting public. The auditorium of Kalarasa art gallery became an auction hall for a high valued object (2013). There is a conventional notion of consuming art as an object. This tends to convert the spaces that host the condition into linear, pedagogical spaces. KalaRasa Gallery was an institutional space for art in South Bangalore and was a node under-development. It offered its auditorium space to 080:30 on October 2nd, 2013. 080:30 occupied the space for a day with an anti-yardstick proposition of situating “art as a non-object”. A day-long event at the KalaRasa Art Gallery was programmed, and each artist was given a time frame of 15 minutes to inhabit the space with ‘non-object art’ while the audience occupied the auditorium. The traditional relationship between art and its audience was cross-questioned by the artists through performances (as art), discussion (as art), lecture (as art), presentation (as art), activism (as art), simulation (as art) etc. The artists opened up the spatial possibilities of Kalarasa Auditorium with their work. It became a proscenium, a studio, a local bar, a playground, a theater and lot more. The method of consuming art within the space was no longer linear and art became a mode of discourse and active conversation. The event was titled ‘pollens of conversation’. And hosting several conversations on October 2nd 2013, Kalarasa art gallery was liberated from its habitual connotations. “this is not an art gallery”

Placing art 1.0 –“Layout lacking lightness” Site : Footbridge at the junction of Sankey Road and Palace Road

#infrastructure #TemporalLaboratory #CityasStudio A bat-signal is an iconic moment of a projected image. It has connotations to several fleeting emotions that occur with the arrival of a super hero or a vigilante and is a moment of impending excitement. This tool was used by occupy Wall Street movement on November 17th, 2011 and there was a ‘bat-signal’ projected onto a corporate building. Brooklyn Bridge was one of the vantage points that allowed the people to witness the moment in excitement. This was a significant exchange between the city, the people and infrastructure because it constructed a moment of fiction, albeit in the tone of dissent. The footbridge near NGMA - Bangalore, at the junction of Sankey road and Palace road is a spacious structure that lacks utility, also demands utility and imagination. It is subservient to its layout that has rendered it obsolete since its conception. The layout provides a vantage point of considerable footprint at a crucial juncture within the city, and is propped up by the steps that rival the ones in front of large temples of worship. The bridge is three stories high and experiences a single digit footfall at peak hours. On a particular Sunday evening, 080:30 occupied the bridge with the intent of creating chance encounters of art. The place was transformed into an active node of contemporary art laboratory for the evening. The ominous steps, the dark passageway and the vantage points became imaginative and fictional sites for performances, installations, video projections and multimedia art. The dormant layout of the infrastructure became a layout for testing ideas. Artists used the bridge as a vantage point to project images onto the city, creating fictional overlaps of caricature and live traffic. An artist performed a ritual of climbing the overwhelming steps of the bridge to seek blessings, providing adequate connotations to its stature. And an accomplished bharatnatyam dancer turned the bridge into a place for lightness and play, to name a few. The reprogramming of the bridge allowed for many serendipitous moments for the occasional users of the footbridge during that evening. The intervention was titled ‘Placing art 1.0’. It was the first of many propositions by 080:30 to test the fictional quotient of urban infrastructure.

Placing art 2.0 – “Edited Cartography” Site – Kadrenhalli Cross, Bangalore

#SocialFabric #erasure #infrastructure

“Tenali started scanning through the development plans of the city. He found that they were made in parts, rectangles that would have to be joined to make the whole city. Tenali out of curiosity started looking for his house on the 1:2500 scale plan. His finger ran over the familiar streets until it slipped from the edge of the sheet. He tried to locate it on the adjoining street and found only a part of it there. Excited at his dicovery, Tenali set out to explore the edges of the rest of the Development plans. He found one particular instance that was missing a fractional wedge on the sheet. At 1:2500 scale the fractional wedge was a hairline. Not at 1:100 scale he thought. Tenali further corroborated the mistakes by measuring plans from the Land and Estate Department. He redrafted plans of the area he was scrutinising by transferring the measurements mentioned in the land and

property documents of the plots he was examining and the adjacent road. He found, a wedge of land in the city that was not documented or measured. He appropriated it. He decided to build an urban bedroom on it”. – Tactical City by Rupali Gupte.

Bangalore city’s fabric is under constant under renovation and adjustment since the past fifteen years. Infrastructure has been added and certain parts of the social fabric have been subtracted. While the infrastructure mostly caters to the needs of mobility, the subtraction does occupy an awkward space-in-void within the new urban fabric. This alludes to the found space appropriated by Tenali. One such place is at Kadrenhalli cross in South Bangalore. A line of existing buildings were dissected and the road was widened with an underpass being carved out of what was remaining. This act turned the rooms into open balconies and the structure defied gravity. The cartographic lines, the building edges were literally left open ended while the underpass assumed a neatly manicured space. The map now seemed like a leftover of an un-edited text with no spell checks. And art was eager to provide the adequate vocabulary to fill in the blanks. The project lasted around three weeks in discussions/ site-visits and four days, including a weekend, of on-site production. The site visits offered several archeological encounters. It allowed 080:30 to have conversations with the local residents who provided insights into the local narratives and politics. There were many observations made regarding the aesthetics of the advertisements (visual culture) present, the local movement patterns, the leftover construction materials, the local characters and particularly, the accumulation of waste in the certain dilapidated spaces. Several sites were identified that offered different situations of space and character. The dilapidated space next to the temple, the blank walls that plugged a place cut open by the road-widening, the interior spaces that showed signs of them being a kitchen, a bedroom or a bathroom were cross referenced by the local tea seller, the local fruit vendor, the local kids or the local blacksmith. The local narratives of cartographic erasure had immeasurable depth and content for the artists to find their expression. The individual projects accommodated various forms; from drawing, installation, social sculptures, place-making interventions, murals and conversations. These dilapidated, derelict structures were latent with innumerable programmatic possibilities but depicted the site as a leftover of an urban process and time. The site-specific works provided a much needed alternative perspective for the spaces, allowing the place to transition from a leftover place to a place with poetic facades and latent possibilities. Social change was never an active mandate for 080:30 within the scope of this project, but few of the places changed because of the attention it received during the intervention. A blank wall found real estate value once it was uplifted by the artwork it hosted during the intervention and a couple of dumping grounds within the site were cleared overnight (we still wonder who did this?). Many micro narratives were born after three weeks and four days of artistic gestation. The place developed as a palimpsest that now had a layer of art over several layers of social negotiations and infrastructural disruptions. An artists’ collective in Indonesia, went to a regular household, with no affiliations to ‘contemporary art’, and used their house as a studio. Eventually, the artists left their artwork in the households, turning the people into art-collectors. An art-collector in this context, takes a very poetic connotation. We conceptualized our approach towards this project with a similar intent. For three weeks and four days, the neighborhood was a place for archeological conversations, artistic interventions and social engagement. It became a temporal art district.

SOCIAL FABRIC080:30

Event – “Pastiche, layout and activism” Site: kumara Krupa Road, Bangalore.

#Pastiche #Layout #Activism ChitraKala Parishat is one of the art schools in Bangalore, and they host an annual event called ‘ChitraSanthe’. Among the many facets of the event, one of the most notable elements is the transformation of the streets adjoining the school. For one day, the main road is turned into a street-gallery and a museum. The streets become places for ‘live-portraits’, fast food, moving public-audience and other floating programs. The sidewalks become temporal places for local artists to showcase and sell their artworks. Replica and pastiche is a common theme for these sidewalk galleries, with many works of “masters” being reproduced for the public to purchase. One of the 080:30 artists pastiched ‘Scream’ by Edward Munch as a performance amidst the event. The artist inserted herself within the canvas of the masterpiece and, true to its title, screamed at various moments within the event. The event was punctuated with the periodic voice of the Edward Munch’s masterpiece until the performer’s throat was fatigued. Flash-mob has proven to be an effective tool to intervene in public places. This was an instance of lightness where a site-specific-flash-performance placed itself within the art-event. Zebra crossing is a set of lines, a layout, which informs the user to cross the road within its width. If we overlay a layout of hop-Scotch on it, there will be instances where people will hop across the street rather than just walk across. This is a poetic intervention for a regular everyday routine. With a lot of moving parts in the event, considerable amount of spatial management is necessary. While there is a rigid layout made by the institution for the sidewalk galleries (or stalls); the public, the street artists and the food vendors are in constant negotiation with each other for space. A 080:30 artist found this to be an opportunity for art and overlaid a 40’X90’ carpet of sky on a 50’ wide street. This enabled the chitra santhe artists to set up their floating programs on the layout, while the public moved on the street. The work channeled the street with poetic efficiency.

Performance as process – Becoming Situationists #place #history #moment #material

080:30 curated a performance art festival that spanned four interventions in four public places over a period of three months. 080:30 had previously engaged with ideas of layout, event-space, place-making and space as tools for performance. Each team member had assumed the roles of a curator, artist and a laborer at different moments within all of 080:30’s works. With the performance art festival, the role of a situationist started to take shape. A situationist is a researcher, an archeologist, an urbanist and a story teller. The situationist plays an active role in proposing alternative situations for the artists to inhabit, but also is aware of multiple narratives unfolding during the work and after it. Spatial notions, urban myths, folklores and materials that contain possibilities for fiction are presented as concept notes for the artists to inhabit and react to. 080:30 recognised four situations in Bangalore.

“Sand spot” Site : Nayandhalli Junction, Mysore road

Rishibhavathi Valley in Bangalore and Nayandhalli Junction is a place of nostalgia, infrastructure and displaced resources. Rishibhavathi was once a river that flowed through Bangalore, which has now been turned into a sewage channel. And Nayandhalli junction is a node that assembles highways, water and sewage lines at the mouth of the city. This node is currently (2014) experiencing construction, with highways and metro tracks being laid over it. This node is also the starting point for construction activity happening all across Bangalore. Sand is transported from various river banks, in its authentic hues and textures, in trucks that have restricted entry into the city. They have inhabited the Nayandhalli Junction (the checkpoint) as their temporal parking space and sand dumping ground. This multitude of events set up the scene at Rishibhavathi valley and Nayandalli Junction as a place of water, waste, construction, sand dunes, urban wells, traffic, mythology and history. A place-in-process. Suvannamaccha, was a mermaid princess, who in a bid to spoil Hanuman’s plans of building the bridge across the sea, is said to have fallen in love with him. And Waldo is a character hidden within a sea of people in kid’s books who is waiting to be discovered. Waldo is camouflaged within the dense pixels of a populated surface and the search for his presence provokes the interest of both the kids and adults alike. The mermaid and Waldo are two characters that invoke nostalgia, romance and discovery. Nayandhalli Junction and rishibhavathi Valley was the site for a mermaid swimming in an urban well. She was alongside a boatman who was lost in a place that is densely pixilated with garbage; and many other performative narratives that 080:30 situated during their intervention at the place. A hammock hung from the underbelly of the flyover and a periscope was inserted next to it, allowing an inside-look into the infrastructure. There were custom-made shoes that left behind little houses when they walked over sand and a camel stood silent in front of the sand trucks parked next to the highway. A game was devised to establish a conversation with the local truck drivers, the local inhabitants of the place, and the sand dunes were turned into a place for a social gathering with a film screening during night for them. The works inspired the local audience to become active participants of the place. There was an instance where two other girls hopped into the well with the mermaid and the truck drivers became authors of the playlist that was screened after sundown. The genre of individual works spanned various forms of place making, activism, story telling, urban-furniture, social engagement, play and poetry. The works celebrated the nostalgic allusions and the temporal nature of the place, providing artistic memories for both.

“Site specific carnival/“ICE SPOT” Site: Hombe Gowda Public School grounds

“ಕರಯ ನೕರನು ಕರಗ ಚ ಲ” is the first line of Sri Purandara Dasa’s krithi that holds a significant

symbolic meaning in the project. Bangalore’s history of lakes has been a topic of several discussions in the city. Most of the lakes in the city were man-made and a lot of them were un-made into residential layouts, stadiums, playing fields and bus stands. One such lake that was turned into a playground is at Wilson Garden, near Lal Bagh, Bangalore. It serves as a playing field for the Hombe Gowda Public School. 080:30 took a curatorial decision to work with blocks of ice, as the medium to intervene in this site. The slow diffusion of the material into the natural bed of water determined the

duration of the intervention. The material acknowledged the archeology of the site and celebrated the playful connotation of its current land use. The intervention was conceived to have two components. Ice installations were made to engage the local kids, allowing them to embrace the artist group and the new material. Making a slide with ice-blocks along existing steps, using the ice block as cricket wickets, providing watermelon and cucumber off an ice block ‘storefront’, created a favorable ambience with the existing public and encouraged them to engage with the material. The second component was the artists performing with ice. A multitude of performative acts were undertaken simultaneously. There were artists playing in a small swimming pool with local kids, juggling ice blocks, making ice-gola and distributing it, distributing balloons and temporary tattoos while a lotus floor was blooming up and down from the surface of the field; to name a few. The performances started late afternoon with the arrival of colored Ice blocks onto the site and continued until the Ice blocks had seeped into the lake bed. A wide range of performative acts by the artists unfolded as the ice melted and the local public embraced it as a local material. 080:30, together with the local pubic situated chaos, colors, confusion and fun in the place, the makings of a site-specific carnival.

“playlist of performances” Site : K.R.Market

Behrupiyas, were traditional performing artists, and represented an active profession in earlier societies. They were agents of folk entertainment whose trait was to entertain by blending in and becoming seamless and invisible characters or become visible characters showcasing diverse narratives. Behrupiyas were impressionists often employed by the kings to survey the social conditions of their kingdoms from within. Kempe Gowda himself is said to have wandered the streets, dressed as a commoner, with particular interest in Balepete – a market for Bangles and Chikpete and Nagarthpete – markets for textile trade. The pete area is laden with seeds of Bangalore history and presents a milieu of various textures, flavors and social ecologies of contemporary times. The K.R.Market and surrounding area is densely populated by narratives that motivated 080:30 artists. Many facets of contemporary folk narratives of the place unfolded through a play-list of live-art performances. Each performance alluded to a particular local flavor and collectively presented the depth of the existing socio-cultural layers. The local commuters witnessed an eagle walking along the K.R. market flyover with her flock flying above her and the local flower vendors witnessed four huge paper bags arrive from within and continue in a procession around the K.R.Market building. The fruit sellers created rhyming poetry with a character handling a megaphone and a stray zebra painted his stripes on the road. The performances highlighted the contemporary materials that form the modern Pete Area. The flyover, the ecologies of the excess, the local scripts that the vendors use to sell their fruits and flowers are a few of the textures highlighted by the artist performances as spaces and materials that construct the daily routines of Pete Area. These processes will change in the future, with infrastructural adjustments, real estate corrections and cultural shifts but these performances act as an effective marker to document the present which might serve as nostalgia for the future.

“Frenzy” Site : Kamraj Road and neighboring streets.

“Shopping is arguably the last remaining form of public activity. Through a battery or increasingly predatory forms, shopping has infiltrated, colonized, and equally replaced almost every aspect of urban life. Town center, suburbs, streets, and now airports, train stations and museums, hospitals, schools and the internet are shaped by the mechanisms and spaces of shopping. The voracity by which shopping pursues the public has, in effect, made it one of the principal – if not only modes by which we experience the city. Perhaps the beginning of the 21st century will be remembered as the point where the urban could no longer be understood without shopping.” - Project on the City II: The Harvard Guide to Shopping.

080:30 identified the delirium that occurs during weekends, in and around Commercial Street: Bangalore. With ‘visibility’ as the primary concern in the realm of shopping, the billboards, the windows, the sidewalks and traffic signals are the moments that claim any space within the visual periphery of human gaze as valuable real estate. The intervention was conceived to capture the fleeting mood of the public in their shopping frenzy and register the place-making that occurs within this context. The project was situated at the intersections of art, architecture, the streets of Kamraj Road and its adjacent locales. It worked with the aspects of display, visibility and spaces that enabled the same. A three storey building that hosted the textile showroom of Chabbra555 was adopted as one of the sites for the project. The display windows where the mannequins were displayed were sites for artists to intervene. These display windows were later used as screens for projecting live performance after dark, establishing a digital interface between the street and the window. While Chabbra555 was a prominent visual marker during the intervention, the artists inhabited several moments along Kamraj road, Dickenson road and Commercial street. The display windows along Commercial Street were sites for inspection for an artist dressed as a mime and the sidewalks was a fashion ramp for an artist who had a long skirt made from the leftover fabric of a garment factory. The traffic signal at night, the changing rooms of boutique stores, the facades of the existing buildings, spaces of all scales and genre were translated as sites for artist’s interventions. Later, the live windows of Chabbra555, were briefly turned into billboards that screened live footage of the street. Sze Tsung, a photographer and artist interested in urban studies observes that, "Not only is shopping melting into everything, but everything is melting into shopping…”, thus becoming the defining activity of public life. The intervention at Kamraj road and surrounding streets allowed art to momentarily occupy the space that shopping has made its home base, without disturbing its surrounding frenzy. And the hope is that some of it was for art.

#CityasStudio #Gallery #Non-objectArt #infrastructure #TemporalLaboratory

#CityasStudio#SocialFabric #erasure #infrastructure #FoundVocabulary#place #history #moment #material #loophole

#080:30

< >

CITY AND NARRATIVES080:30

SARAI READER 09 CITY AS STUDIO 03 POLLENS OF CONVERSATION NAVEEN MAHANTESH CONTENTS BRIEF CONCEPT/IDEA CONVERSATIONS/JAMMING

BRIEF The project enters the space at the third episode of the SARAI READER 09 – THE

EXHIBITION. The third episode has been themed as “art as place”. The brief was to

situate an idea/process within the context of the exhibition which has layered over the

past several months.

CONCEPT/IDEA Infest the space with a hundred chairs, some specifically placed and some placed to

suggest a program. The hundred chairs become part of a malleable layout that injects

latency into the space to create, gather and become an event. This ability of the insertion

to generate an event space, would generate the layers for the becoming of a “place”.

CONVERSATIONS/ JAMMING Zuliekha – “jamming a layout” Worked together on an installation/re-installation of the elements existing in the gallery,

along with exploring the idea of a ‘ground plan’ as a layout.

The spatial installation along with the chair, provided a scenography for an interface/ conversation.

Gagandeep Singh – “Direction to an opening”ingh Gagandeep’s installation was working within a closed space, separated by a screen. The chair’s were placed next to his space as a suggestion and this started a conversation with the artist, the space and the chairs. This conversation eventually opened a window into his installation and later functioned as an effective opening for a dialogue during the radio play.

Parul Gupta – “suggesting subtlety” Parul Gupta’s subtle installation/intervention in the space would force a second look for its appreciation. During the conversation with the artist, in the space, we observed that the subtlety of the art work would go unnoticed, even when we explicitly pointed it out to the by-stander/visitors/gazers. Two chairs were put in suggestion of the subtlety. And people’s response to the suggestion was quite interesting. t in

POLLENS OF CONVERSATION NAVEEN MAHANTESH | +0918095893826 | Naveen.mahantesh@gmail.com