Around 200 students, teachers and staff of a Borivali college have curated a glossary of terms and altered narratives that emerged in the past year
Submissions from the glossary and exhibition themed on changing work practices. Pics Courtesy/Sea
A for anticipation of the unknown, B for blurred idea of privacy, C for collapse of the health system — the ABCs of life changed overnight last year. Since the first lockdown, the faculty members and students of Borivali’s School of Environment and Architecture (SEA) started having discussions on how the pandemic will leave a permanent mark on our lives. “But we were trapped in our houses and could only tell our own stories. It reminded one of what Salman Rushdie wrote in Midnight’s Children: ‘It is like watching a film with your cheeks touching the screen — what one can see is only one pixel’,” shares urbanist, architect and professor Rupali Gupte. They realised that the only way to make sense of the changing reality was to document individual stories. Two hundred people from SEA then set out to capture the way existing practices changed and new values emerged, thanks to the invisible virus. The result: Covid Glossary, a dictionary-cum-virtual-exhibition of these stories.
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Balcony shenanigans
The glossary — supported by Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne, and Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai — was launched in March, marking a year since the first lockdown. The team which put together the glossary includes urbanist, architect and professor Prasad Shetty, Gupte, and designers of the project, Vastavikta Bhagat and Moomal Shekhawat. It has two parts — the glossary, which is a collection of 400 stories, and the exhibition, which draws up patterns from the stories. The landing page of the interactive exhibition is designed like a galaxy of floating spheres. “When one clicks on a sphere, they’re directed to a constellation of stories that put together a narrative. No two people can view the exhibition in the same manner,” Shetty informs us.
Bathing of vegetables.
From documentation of increased app/screen time and how the balcony emerged as a new space for activities, to the proliferation of gharguti (small-scale, domestic) businesses, the glossary does a nuanced job of capturing the pandemic experience. The curators note that the stories broadly address four kinds of reconfigurations. First, there are spatio-temporal reconfigurations, with the idea of home collapsing. “For people living in small houses, the street, the neighbourhood and their workplace were home, which shut down. At the same time, the digital space became home for many. But with the deep digital divide, a lot of people suddenly became homeless,” reasons Gupte. Then, there’s sensorial reconfiguration — for instance, the dependence on eyes and ears substantially increased, mediated largely through the digital medium, while the sense of smell, taste and touch have been affected. “There’s also institutional reconfiguration, [reflected in] the cities of Mumbai and Delhi experiencing a breakdown of health infrastructure, along with a crash in education system and government machinery. The last part is reconfigurations in work and living,” Shetty elaborates.
(From left) Rupali Gupte; Prasad Shetty; Moomal Shekhawat; Vastavikta Bhagat
The duo tells us that the glossary is a work-in-progress. “It will continue to grow until the pandemic fades away. It may become a physical exhibition and also a book,” they conclude.
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