FEATURING: Sudhir Patwardhan, Shilpa Gupta, Hema Upadhyay and Gieve Patel

VENUE: ARTIndia, Jindal Mansion Lobby, Pedder Road, Mumbai. SATURDAY 12 DECEMBER, 6-8PM

Appreciating the city as a work in progress helps us come to grips with a series of provisionalities, half-truths and slippages that govern our mutant image cultures, direct our aural-visual experiences and confirm our continuously transforming social selves. The act of translation offers the resources to appreciate the development of identities and ideas, subjectivities and selves.

How does one city offer itself as a metaphor, a translatorial template to decode another? How does one city suggest the presence or adumbrate the absence of another? How do we train our ears to listen to the conversation between metroplitan centres and of course, the increasingly important peripheries?

To address the variety of ways in which cities across geographies and timescales; nations, narrations and networks; get continuously produced, this event invites cultural practitioners to participate in creating a map of memories that grows over time. Half a dozen artists, architects, writers and scholars will make short presentations tracing their own connections between forms, objects, words, expressions, sounds, buildings, languages, literatures, textures of life that belong to two or more distinct urban worlds. Each presentation (a spoken piece, a sound installation, a video, an enactment, among other things) will be orchestrated to create a kind of a sequence that leads to an open-ended discussion at the end that could invite the assembled audience to participate. The idea would be to create an event that draws from the energies of a panel discussion and meshes them with a performance piece.

The event will be held at the ART India lobby space at Jindal Mansion on Pedder Road where the Colloquies are held. The event will be mounted over a couple of hours and the audience will be a mobile, shifting one. New people coming in will join in the process of creating this dramatic landscape of real and imaginary, visible and invisible cities.

Curated by Abhay Sardesai. Editor, ARTIndia