[architectural and subjective expansions and withdrawals]
A dialogue between Pages and practitioners of the Cybermohallah in Delhi.
During Pages’ residency in Delhi in November and December 2006, we had some very dynamic, and interesting exchanges with the participants of Cybermohalla Labs. The conversations are the beginning of a long-term collaborative project and dialogue, which we will post regularly on the Daily Pages.
About Cybermohallah:
Through a collaboration between Sarai-CSDS and Ankur, since 5 years ago 3 Labs have been situated in different settlements in working class localities across the city of Delhi. These labs bring the young inhabitants of these settlements together and provide them with facilities such as a few computers, portable digital recorders and cameras. The labs are self-regulated spaces, where practitioners meet daily for conversations, listening to each other and experimenting with diverse media forms.
LNJP (an informal settlement in Central Delhi), Dakshinpuri (a resettlement colony in south Delhi) and Nangla Maanchi (demolished in August 2006, see http://nangla.freeflux.net); are neighbourhoods in Delhi that were developed first by the migrants coming from outside Delhi, and now growing dynamically. The three labs are located in these neighbourhoods.
Jeebesh Bagchi: In these neighbourhoods the conflicts are on how much you can expand your territories, and what you can call your own legitimate expansion, and what is the common agreement on what the limits are. The question is always if its a take-over of the land or an extension within one's own territory?
Azra Tabassum: There is a kind of fear of the expansion among the people: "once you continue expanding more, you may eventually enter my house!"
Lakhmi Kohli: There are two aspects to this. One is the overflow of 'things', and the other is the structure that holds these 'things'. The 'things' overflow and ask for more space. And to expand the structure accordingly means 'conflict'. This is the kind of tension that is there within each structure that we see. This is an inherent tension of structures around us.
Nasrin Tabatabai: Do you mean this is generally the case with all structures?
Lakhmi Kohli: If you have a shop, the goods in the shop grow. But if the shop itself grows accordingly, it starts to occupy something else, something outside it, and then there will be a clash. It’s a similar case when the house grows. There are two kinds of growths. One causing the conflict and the other is the propensity for growing: things in the shop have the propensity for growing. But the structure, if it grows in that propensity it will start causing conflicts. The person who is in the middle of these two tensions, between the outward limits of physical expansion and the growing propensity of things inside, somehow lives that tension as something that is not outside him, but what is inward. It is not that I can step outside and look from distance to these two tensions; I live in it and see life as that tension. I narrate it or act upon it, I am infused with it. And that is why in their narration you will find this tension.
Babak Afrassiabi: So its a tensions between expansion and withdrawal that make the person's life?
Nasrin Tabatabai: And is this what you yourself experience in where you live?
Lakhmi Kohli: I have seen a new township that is coming up in Ghevra [the new northern frontier of Delhi]. Initially when it was barren people were building with the idea of “how much I can expand”, but also “how much I cannot expand and what are the limits”. And this was very much part of the discussion. But soon after, this was taken as part of life where you start looking at how many corners I can get around my house, where is the road going, where is my location, etc. So initially all of what you think is external to you ("I should build two more floors", "but I can't do this or that", "one inch here or there"), are soon no more external. They become internal to you. And then there you start looking for ways.
Azra Tabassum: When a space is expanding from within the logic of the need for it to expand, there is then a force in that need which starts to absorb other things and other spaces outside it. The relationship with that outside changes. Each expansion changes the person. One internalizes both the expansions and the withdrawals. It’s a way of inhabiting the expansion and the withdrawal of space inside yourself and your social relations in a very continuous and transforming way. "Break the wall and take the space outside in." That is the way you expand yourself.
Nasrin Tabatabai: We are talking about space in this particular way. It makes me curious if you think about space and your relation to expansion in this same way as part of your daily lives and what you experience?
Jaanu Naagar: I move and counter move. The idea that whether I withdraw or expand is continuously an everyday act. It is inherent to my every relationship and movement physically and materially. You take a move, then you countermove, you may withdraw and it may be against you, so you act upon it... it is a kind of continuous negotiation that is a part of life.
Neelofar: Sometimes you want to establish yourself powerfully through the expansion of your space. So it’s not merely about expansion, but also what gives you the possibility to articulate power over others and gives you power to negotiate more effectively with the authorities or others. So it’s not only about expansion, expansion comes with having been able to make a claim that makes me more effective in my negotiation with and over others. It’s not a neutral game of moves and counter moves, but something that also produces certain forms by which I continuously re-establish my power over the location and my negotiating claims over it.
Rabiya Quraishy: There was a berma (a water resource were families would assemble) which was located next to someone's door and was a lively common space. With the arrival of a bit of tap water in the neighbourhood people's need for that place was reduced. So the house next to it expanded and incorporated the berma into its expansion. As a result the space of the berma was demobilized and is no longer there. So expansion can become at some level a barrier in the very logic of the space. You may internally expand but you may actually cut off others from access. Of course the life surrounding the berma had already shrunk because of the introduction of another means for getting water.
Babak Afrassiabi: So that is how expansion becomes exclusion in relation to others outside it, a forced withdrawal for others?
Tripan Kumar (Raju): One person's need can become other person's need also, when your need to expand caters others' need. That is one form of expansion. Other times a person's need for expansion constricts other persons' need of space and things. So there are two sides to the logic of expansion. You have a shop and you are doing very well. It may be a small space but you are catering other people and have no problem. But suddenly your neighbour produces an extension and creates for himself a larger space. And this starts affecting you, where the visibility of your space is gone. So you need also to expand. Something that was initially not your need becomes a necessity. Here the logic of expansion is introduced by someone else and not by you. And this is a continuous game. So its not necessarily you who always has the logic of expansion. You may be forced into it because someone else had set the logic for expansion due to his own needs and reasons. This produces a chain reaction where the logic of expansion keeps on moving, from an internally propelled logic, propelled by actions produced by others, which then affects you in a kind of relay.
Nasrin Tabatabai: It seems that most of the examples have been about horizontal expansion. Are there any differences between horizontal and vertical expansions?
Yashoda Singh: The horizontal form of expansion is a conflict-ridden expansion, which is continuous. That is different than the vertical form of expansion. The vertical expansion can be associated with your claim as a personality that "I have achieved more in life", "I have made a bigger claim in life", which is a social recognition of an achievement. As I go up, with every added story I produce a spatial structure that makes me socially more recognizable.
Shamsher Ali: As you go up the idea of your space changes. You are no longer limited only by horizontal change. You start to compare your space with other sets of parameters. You see a larger space by which you mark your own space. This is an expansion of a certain perceptive field, which changes your relationship with the space itself.
Yashoda Singh: Going up is not an easy thing. You always wait for another person to go a step up and then you follow. So there is also a relay by which you start legitimizing yourself. You can also become alone and cut off as you go up, because you start to make a claim larger than what people around you have.
Babli Rai: We had a house with a wooden wall next to it, which marked our space. The guy next door wanted to build and go up. For that he needed a brick structure, a brick wall to go up. He asked my father to pay half the costs so he can build the wall. My father said no "you go ahead and built up your wall and I will keep my wooden wall". The neighbour said, "this is a very smart thing, once I've built the wall you will remove the wooden thing and you'll have an extra brick wall". So these are the kind of negotiations. In order to build for yourself you have to actually negotiate it with others, since you are building something that will be used by someone else in their own future extension.
Lakhmi Kohli: There is the story of this man who sells newspapers on just a single plank on a bus stand. The bus stand was active. Soon an auto stand was established in front him, causing him to lose his visibility. He then lifted the height of his plank by placing the old newspapers under it. Then a shop came up next to him, which increased the number of people and his customers. What is interesting however is that from 6:30 to 9:30 when there is more activity the space expands, the logic of his space expands. And then after that the space shrinks. So the idea of his shop is temporally determined. It is not a fixed thing. When it will expand and when it shrinks is dependent on the movement around him to which he caters. He is not catering within any fixed idea of space. He caters to an extremely mobile, flexible, expanding and withdrawing idea of space, which is determined by other people's movement and acceleration in the space.
Babak Afrassiabi: This is actually an interesting point. I was also thinking of withdrawal, which can also take place through a chain reaction. That it can become a logic that is enforced onto you by others, either the state or your neighbour.
Azra Tabassum: You see, people don't like to be part of others' expansions. You have the fear of being engulfed by someone else's space. So when you expand vertically, you move away a little; you produce the possibility of a bigger 'interior' for yourself. As such a possible earlier form by which people could encounter you in a more dynamic way - in front of your house lets say - is now withdrawn. So what happens is that you may have some relief and time and space for your own, but you are restless because that earlier encounter or multiplicity of people being at your doorstep has moved away. Like in our house. My mother does tailoring and makes clothes. There always used to be people around the house. There was liveliness. We were doing well. So we moved one storey up. My mother says she is relieved and has now more free time to herself. Her fight with her husband has become more private. But she is also restless now that less people are inquiring about her. The more you move upwards and develop vertically, the more partitioned you are from the exteriors. This brings a clear partition between the more privatized interior space and the semi public interior space. And nobody wants to enter your private interior space. Nobody has the inclination to make the effort to enter that privacy, unless one is taken into it. No one has that urge to come up to your first or second floor. So this is a withdrawal also from others' limits in entering your interior space.
Lakhmi Kohli: In the neighbourhood were I live, the city's electric wiring was done based on the idea of the horizontality of the space, that people will be living in single storey houses. The wiring was just above the roof of the first floor. But as people started to develop their houses and build it up to two or three floors, the wiring structure, which initially was integral to the space, became a threat, a danger. Because it appeared too near to the window. So the wiring has to be re-done. It now has to cater the changed space. Vertical space is not a free space that you simply can take over and move up. Verticality can be imagined and be foreseen. You can, by the placement of these wirings say this person can expand that much. This example of anticipation about expansion by others is something that is inherent in the way space is sought. The relationship between infrastructure and your expansion is inherent to the way a building is built and developed.
Nasrin Tabatabai: Do you mean that the wiring, if it is for instance 2-3 meters above the roof of a house, the neighbours can presume that its owner can expand vertically only one story? So in fact this tells you about the future of the expansion?
Lakhmi Kohli: There are various ways people negotiate and protect themselves from the limits within the infrastructure. They would for example place a plastic pipe over the wiring in front of the windows, which would guard you against the electricity. Yes this is inherent to the way things are laid down and the way space is imagined in its future development. Structures that are around a space tell you about the future of the space.
Yashoda Singh: Looking out from the window of the second floor and the window of the ground floor are two different acts. The first is a voyeuristic act and the other a circumscribed act. From the second floor you look down on a woman, you are making a very attempted look at someone, from the ground floor you are more direct and eye to eye. So your ability to negotiate yourself in the space is also circumscribed as you move. It’s not an open visuality but one that is also restricted because others can see you seeing differently.
Azra Tabassum: The idea of looking out at something becomes suspect.
Babak Afrasssiabi: But there is also an interesting aspect that you were talking about, which was about expansion not in space but in time. That you can presume your neighbour is going to expand or even withdraw in the future. (Some developments can even tell you of withdrawal in the future.) So its time and space both which play a role.
Shamsher Ali: Long durations of living in a space with continuous negotiations with the surrounding reality in forms of withdrawal and expansion produces a capacity for you to articulate that space in a much more stable and powerful way. There is an example about a man who is building a house in M Block in Ghevra and he has many bricks which he has gathered to built his house. He narrates the story of each brick, saying this is a brick from 1978, these are from 82, 86, 87, 89, 90 ... And in that narration he produces the story about the many times he had to live through demolishing and building houses. But he has a certain stability and power in his narration. It carries knowledge of what it means to continuously negotiate your life. This comes from long duration of living in a particular space.
Nasrin Tabatabai: This is at the same time an ability to think ahead of the immediacy of your surrounding.
Azra Tabassum: There is also the realm of the fear of long durations of occupancy. When someone is erecting a place to stay there for a long time, it is not easy to destabilize that person. The manner in which this person occupies that space is very different to someone who occupies space for a short duration. Tenants, who have stayed in a house for 40 years or so, make a claim on the house and leave only if they are paid in exchange for their departure.
Azra Tabassum: The growth of the buildings in the LNJP settlement is tied up with the fire in the bastis (settlements). You can in fact tell the story of the fires through the architecture. After the fires for about a month the state did not intervene. They said to the people to make what ever they can. So the people started building very rapidly. That's how the bastis expanded. Architecturally you can understand the expansion and read the stories of the fires.
Jeebesh Bagchi: This is the architecture of fire!
Azra Tabassum: The locality expanded double the size after the fire, in terms of height and density.
Jaanu Naagar: Many people have been recently forced to move to Ghevra on a lease of 10 years, after having paid a share money of Rs. 7000 to the municipality. But today after 6 months, the properties are being sold and resold. In this selling and reselling the future of the place is determined by an image of other places. You cannot sell and resell the properties simply in terms of the places themselves and their own future. What is interesting is that images of other places can give you ideas of what this place will look like in 6 months or a few years. It is the images of other places that draw you to speculate on the future of this place.
Jeebesh Bagchi: The images of other existing places are intrinsic to the speculation of the future of this place; because the logic of this place at its current condition does not itself provide you with enough means to speculate on its future.
Babak Afrassiabi: The question is 'who' defines and channels this image of the future?
Jaanu Naagar: Nangla Maanchi, the settlement were I used to live, got demolished some months ago. We were told that it would be taken over by a power plant. The image of the power plant was given to us regarding the future the place. Now there are many factions, rules and fights. We are again told that the huge bus depot that was on the other side of the town is being reallocated to Nangla Maanchi, because the bus depot is to be turned into a metro station. So now the image provided as its purpose of our displacement and the reality of the negotiations are two different things.
Azra Tabassum: When there is contention of space, when spaces start thriving and there is a tension, it creates a sound, a peculiar sound of the space thriving. There is also the speculated value of the space. The more there is the "Gaj-Gaj" - the sounding of the space thriving and in tension, the more is there the stimulus to speculate and visualize. This starts changing the way you look at the space. The more thriving it is - that is the more accelerating it is and the more claims have been made on it - the more it starts entering the imagination of the people and you start imagining about it.
Babak Afrassiabi: So the question can be formulated as: who outlines the imaginary visualization of this sound? Can we as inhabitants affect the sounding of this space in a way that it would then provoke other imaginary forms than what is provoked from outside?
Jaanu Naagar: There is this guy whom we've met and who drives a bus in long distances. He said when he came to Delhi first, the bus he drove was new. For him it was a new thing. Now there is this talk about a new bus replacing his bus, which is a high-speed one imported from Germany or somewhere. He has no idea of what this new bus even looks like. The question that he is asking himself is "what will be made of me when I encounter that bus".
Babak Afrassiabi: In a way he is interrogating the unpredictability of this encounter, interpreting it into his 'self' in the future.
Nasrin Tabatabai: Can you elaborate on this example of the bus driver in relation to the idea of space and how one imagine space?
Jaanu Naagar: Here is a story: there is a massive fog and the bus driver tells the conductor that I cannot see well, how can I drive. The conductor replies I will stand at the door and will look out and navigate you. At the moment the driver says he cannot see and drive, he makes possible for the conductor to say he will navigate and take this bus ahead. So when someone says he cannot see ahead, there is the possibility that someone else will say I will navigate you. There is here a relationship between not being able to see and someone being able to navigate.
Nasrin Tabatabai: Maybe this can be interpreted as such that some force that navigate ones imagination and are outside oneself, can at the same time be part of ones subjectivity?
Shamsher Ali: My father is saying to us now that the future is going to be very difficult and dark (Kharab). There are two ideas of the future here: one is what he had imagined as our future, which he has worked on, and the second is the idea that there is a dark future or a fall ahead. With the idea of the future as a fall, he has become dependent on the lateral stories and advises from around him. So he is now drawing ideas more from what his surrounding and the people around him are bringing to him, about other places, other people etc. In that sense once his future is foggy he becomes more porous. He has become more receptive to other images people bring him, more porous to other subjectivities.
Shamsher Ali: When the conductor says to the driver "I will navigate you since things are foggy for you", the immediate question is how did the driver come to trust the conductor and accept his navigation?
Babak Afrassiabi: We talked about expansion and withdrawal and now the story about the driver and the conductor. You analyze and interpret these forms and ways of expansion and withdrawal both as social and psychological spaces. It would now be interesting to think of the way one can - through interpretation and analysis - actually affect these spaces, and thereby others. To search for a way to affect the visualization and imagination of these space in the future, so that the future is no longer looked at as "kharab" or dark but productive, both socially and psychologically. I think "the conductor", which could be each one of you basically, can play a role in this space of the future, where expansion and withdrawal is not only out of a necessity but also can provide a space for creativity, in which everyone can participate and can become the conductor at one point.
Shamsher Ali: There is also another mode to the "Kharab": The "kharab" that the father is talking about is not just the question of fogginess. It is also a way of preparing us. The idea of "kharab" is mobilized to prepare us, so that when the day comes, it is no longer "kharab" for us any more. We are prepared to take it on. So it is a mobilization of preparation for the future, so that the day we are encountering it we are not paralyzed by it, but we have enough preparation for it to go through it.
Nasrin Tabatabai: this is what most parents do, to give you more awareness.
Shamsher Ali: This is a kind of an ‘eventuality’ thought, that you may lead life thinking you are doing well, but keep the eventuality in your mind so that you are prepared for it as you live your life. Do not for a second move away from the eventuality.
Azra Tabassum: The conductor never said to the drive "move out, I will now drive the bus". He said I will navigate you. Shamsher's father is not saying to him you are too young to understand the future. He is producing an image of the future for him so he can prepare himself. At some level he is not taking the seat away from under him, but telling him to keep an eventuality in mind to prepare yourself.
Nasrin Tabatabai: Does this preparation for the future always involve the space one lives in or it also implies moving away to a different place?
Shamsher Ali: It is both. When you see an image of a fall you produce a preparedness for your environment. My father produced this image many times. But the intensity and the shape of that image changes. So it is a kind of a preparation that make your hold onto the space stronger, or you may prepare yourself for an eventuality where you can't hold onto the space so you move on. But this is simultaneous, one does not contend the other. Because the image is being produced with an intensity and a form that is shifting. In that sense the fall is something that is delayed and also prepared for.
Babak Afrassiabi: In a way the image of the fall or the foggy future, functions as a productive element; a way to maintain the desire for a better future.
Jeebesh Bagchi: Or a prepared future.
Babak Afrassiabi: It is at once a defence mechanism which can also be productive. I think it is the interpretation of the fall that is important here: is it an interpretation for ones preparation or is the fall simply ones dark future?
Shamsher Ali: In fact such is the preparedness that when the fall comes one would not know its a fall.
Babak Afrassiabi: This is a little perverse story I am going to tell you so excuse me. A man is taken away from his lover and kept in solitude. He is permitted contact with her only if he accepts to be executed after the love making. The question is if the thought of his death that awaits him after his encounter with his lover would add to the pleasure of his love making or will it actually reduce the pleasure.
Azra Tabassum: I think it will be a highly exiting and frenetic encounter because you will look beyond all the lacks that the relationship may have had.
Lakhmi Kohli: There is this guy who lives in the forest of a settlement. There is the belief that if anybody sees him something bad will happen to him or her. So the king comes and sees him and he falls and cuts his finger. The king gets very angry and says that this guy is really threatening, so let him be hanged publicly so that the fear of this man will leave everyones heart. So the king's counsellor arranges the hanging at the gallows. There are two gallows. The king and everybody else gathers around. The king asks why there are two gallows. The counsellor says there is one for the man and one for you. The king asks how come. He replies to the king: you saw him and you fell and cut only one finger but he saw you and he is now losing his life, so who is more threatening?… The place I live is continuously transforming and is continuously unbalanced. Nothing about it is stable. Roads are being dug, houses are being built, things are being broken down and other things are coming up. In the digging of the road you lose a part of your house, there is employment crisis, somebody doesn't get employed, someone else looses his job. Everything is continuously unbalanced and to survive there, is too fragile. And this is all happening within a city which itself is speculating upwards, so everything has a value beyond what you see. There is something else happening there too. To live there you need to produce a balance for yourself, a stability of mind. Because you can't carry all that instability. The stability is also partly what you receive from your parents, at school and what you have picked up through the processes of your various encounters. You produce a stability which is an attempt to take a step into the space. Which is seen as an important step by others. This is a way of not falling out of this environment. And this is something that is continuously produced through images of the future which you establish at some level in your mind.
Jeebesh Bagchi: This is something I find extremely difficult to explain to people living in Europe. Because they take stability for granted; the road is going to be like this for the next twenty years, the house is going to be like that for the next thirty years; They have a museum relationship to the space.
Babak Afrassiabi: Can you explain this a little more. Because now it seems that this idea of stability, or its visualization is a counter visualization for the "fall". How do you create this stability? The preparation for the fall can neutralize the fall. What you said was interesting, that when you are prepared for the eventuality of the fall you will not recognize it as a fall once you are in its midst. That is a way of preparation, but actually its a way of assuming a passive stand in regard to the fall. The concept of 'eventuality' is in fact a passive attitude towards life when is not taken as a possibility. The idea of producing balance on the other hand works against this passivity because then you have to work for it every moment of your life. As such you are confronting the fall by standing in front of it, and not passing through it without realizing. So the idea of producing balance has within it a realization and a recognition of your surrounding which is productive.
Nasrin Tabatabai: The balance is also an inner state.
Azra Tabassum: The fogginess of the future and the instability of the present is continuously brought in a relief through drawing on an experience that gives you a point to stand still. You draw from that experience to say that I can now stand still for this moment. Instability which is a kind of wrinkling and shivering, and the fogginess are continuously around you. That is for everyone. But when someone brings in an experience that bear on narrating life to various images of the self, it produces a moment of stillness, a moment of stability. The moment of stillness has two forms to it. One is to propel you to move ahead and to think ahead. The other is to withdraw you to stand still to observe and recognize things. It has two different velocities.
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