TOURISTIC GUIDE TO KOLKATA

Reality tours, anxious and worried tourists that need to understand the real world: Go to Kolkata, see the way they live, talk to the people and feel the immeasurable differences and resemblances, see what disorder means and forget about accurate calculations… try then to come back.

When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about. Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955),

SINK IN THE CITY

The air is humid and cold tonight.
Close your eyes and contain respiration, here comes another one...

Keep on moving arms and legs. Contracted your belly, your heavy head moves disoriented trying not to get lost from its body.
Exhausted and breadless beats your heart full of panic.
Follow the light, get impulse and stretch your neck to seek the surface.
Come on, breath.

You are alone and the wind blows furious, something has kidnapped you, keeps on playing, you are the yo-yo.
Tiny creature: what the hell can you do to escape, to get away from this schizophrenic gigantic that has absorbed you?
Better not losing faith, better think and be aware, react or you will die.
Gulp and take air, a good mouthful…


The remote whistle has decreased. Gods have calmed down.
It is time to start again, the moment to find a way to survive. Cruel is destiny and your last chance could this be.
Your wet feet slide the water, look around… It seems no perspective does exist in such an infinite horizontality.
Only a shadow is distinguished in the monochromatic uncertain distance. It’s a piece of wood! Take it.
You are a bit safer now you can float.
Inhale, exhale, deeply respire…

It is not easy to survive being a castaway and you are doing it well. Do not hesitate, never give up. Perhaps someday you will experience what equilibrium means, dwelling a piece of land.
Time has passed and you have become a genuine navigator.
For the moment you have a floor, a roof, a bucket to collect the water from the rain and some reserves.
The boat you have piece by piece constructed seems to be stable enough to combat water and wind.
But the horizon keeps still, quiet and monotonous. No land seems to appear.


So much wind, this might be a storm. The water is coming inside.
Hurry up, hold the reserves.
The boat is destroyed.
But remember not to cease fighting, otherwise hunger, thirst and sadness will kill you.
Breathe…


What a contradiction, stepping the ground and feeling the waves, becoming a prisoner of the undertow in a dry land that used to be fertile and generous but appears now scanty and selfish.
Social, political and economic are the new rivers that carry the slipping leftovers of the organized richness to end in uncontrollable oceans of poverty.
Here the paradox of the human egocentric order, where disorder, displaced and concentrated in the forgotten peripheries, keeps on flowing. Like a hidden natural force, clandestine immeasurable energy, chaos gets transformed and moved, is always there and never dies.

How hypocrite, world’s clean hands and red nails, covering dirty armpits and pestilent feet, diamond jewels that hide muddy ears, fake eyelashes mask squinting eyes; how incoherent, studying the ignorance, protecting what attacks and recycling its excesses.
Human civilization has dressed up in luxurious high rise glass perfume but sweats stinky garbage and misery.
Entropy, out in the cold, concentrated and distilled, powerful and pestilent, grows like a sea of essence that expensive cologne can not hide anymore.


Having only ten euros a day is not such a big deal when only for forty eight hours, but imagine just for a moment how would it actually feel to live in such conditions.
The train, the morning coffee and croissant, lunch and dinner; these already are too many expenses for a 10 euro.
Consider what would it happen if you where not so privileged, not enjoying a soft bed in a cosy room; no saved money, documented identity or a formally invested and patented live. How would it feel having no possessions? Are you free from your systematized routine? Food far away while you being hungry; creased feet unprotected reel searching for a firm soil where to stay and get dried, your mouth parched.
Anonymous between billions of creatures that struggle in their right to live, you must know that land has its owners and the air its rules. Ignoring the law will not exempt you from its often distorted execution. Forget about insecurities and uncertainties, feeling impotent will not help at all.


Choose, calculate, think; go and come, forget and affront; search the ways, find the tools; as much as you can, don’t forget what you want; be aware and retain; have courage, no complains; protest, praise, imagine, trust and love.

CHRONOTOPE

Time is a matter of use, if not ask it to a city… Time on itself does not exist; it is a consequence of movement, energy and space. It is good to know the real value of time, and its furtiveness, its relativity and simultaneity. Right now, Dharavi - for example- is living now another time than us, because its reality, spatial and of content and context, is different. This is applicable to the concept of history, where what we call epochs are dilated, remaining in any present.

A GENERIC MAP

A GENERIC MAP

Paul Klee represented the generic city in this drawing, where structures are overlapped infinitely, centre is lost and patterns repeated; where it is easy to get disoriented and, as in an ocean, only the stars can help to understand the space. Flags and symbols are, accustomed, the only identity of the place. This is a generic map.

BAD PICTURES

Relativity makes it difficult to search for something bad or good, they are so subjective and unpredictable. The diversity of opinions and ways to read the pictures each of us showed made them precious art works. They had the capability to catch our curiosity. With unprecedent objectives I could get free of learned schemes and norms... it is a good exercise trying not to like, you may find yourself interested in new things. But I think that our ego and our earlier aesthetic experience makes it very difficult to really try to do anything wrong. Never before had I been dedicated one whole day to take pictures of my daily life environment. This action gives the chance to reobserve and reinterpret what habits and routines hidde.

SEQUENCES

In this workshop I noticed that sometimes I do not appreciate the power and efficiency of something that, as a matter of course, I do, in this case taking pictures. Exploiting the possibilities of a media is not easy, and the use you make of a tool will determine the results their effectiveness. With a sequence of pictures time can be constringed, synthesized. In this workshop I noticed that sometimes I do not appreciate the power and efficiency of something that, as a matter of course, I do. Exploiting the possibilities of a media is not easy, and the use you make of a tool will determine the results their effectiveness. With a sequence of pictures time can be constringed, synthesized...Reflected coffe

BODY: CONTENT AND CONTAINER

The zig-zag lines represent the skin sensibility, and the circles are the areas where the skin becomes more fragil, sensitive and thin. I tried to imagine the bones and organs underneath the skin, and the way the lines of our "envelop" are shaped in order to get adapted to what they contain. The mouth, the belly, ears, eyes and nose are some of the orificies that allow the exterior and our interior to interact and for that reason I tried to emphasize them.

CRESCENT MOTIVATION

Motivation letter to "go know", january 2008

Once again, these Christmas, the little altar embedded in the wall of the entrance hall at my home in Spain welcomed me as I entered the door. This is a special altar; some beautiful antique restored Indian window shutters that my mom bought near the historic Red Forts in New Delhi and latter restored, adding to its background a painting of a Hindu god; a humanized fish that holds up children of different races with its many arms, representing solidarity and equality. With sparkling candles, perfumed incense and pictures or poems, it shelters my mother’s wishes, prays, and hopes.

The Indian culture has inspired and delighted to all those who I know have experienced it. People are happy and wise, they say, and they also assure that it is not easy to see what there happens, it is a hard reality which is to be found. And I think to myself: what could be better than study and analyze this reality, to get deep into such an intriguing and multilayered urban condition and maybe then become to a better understanding of our own truth, and so be able to help to change things, to help them and to help ourselves, to knock down (maybe just a few bricks) the frontier that divides the world, an unfair and shellfish frontier.

I’ve always enjoyed inquire into other cultures and to live them as profoundly as possible. For this reason is that I have traveled by myself whenever I have had the time. I first traveled by my own when I was fourteen years old to work in Ireland for a month and a half. Latter I traveled to New York, I was older and a bit more mature, explored more around, walked along the streets, met a lot of people, and got impressed by this imposing and multicultural city. One year ago I went to Denmark, and worked in a farm for two months, experiencing another way of live and meeting a lot of people from different countries, with different necessities, and so, with different working rhythms.

My father is from Chile, and so we went all together there in order to meet our family and roots. It was so impressing, the social and economic differences were extreme, sometimes even frightening, and for the first time saw squatter settlements and people living in really poor conditions. At these places people had to accept each other and learned not to complain about their situation, they just accepted it and sometimes worked hard, other times lost hopes.

I think it is very important to see and feel the world that we inhabit from all its possible corners and gaps. But traveling is not enough, I need advise; want to learn to program and to apply what I learn. I think that this experience would be so didactive and useful to my future. I want to work there in team, share the experience and apply it in the best possible way. Reading the slum of Dharavi and expressing it and trying to order a little this apparent chaos is a very ambitious approach and this studio has a privileged program in order to learn to do so and latter have tools to understand other places, cities and culture.

CONSTRUCTING OUR HOUSE IN A DAY

When we started constructing our little hunt we only had a few pallets and those metalic fences that are shown in the pictures. But we were very optimistic, and we realized that with those two trees we also had a basic structure (this was a very solicitated location in the settlement, also because it was in front of the commun area with its fire place and its beautiful entrance), as the fences were already provided with a kind of beam. Our neighbours accepted to share one of the walls with us, but they

quikly covered it with plastics in search for intimacy... We were surprised, but still we discovered a little hole that served us to nose out in their place... jeje. Those red tubes gave a funny image to our roof, and could be use for recollecting rain water, carried to a buried watertank by those pipes that Alexander is holding (picture left). The little lake in the middle of our community reflected our movements and steps, we chosed this site, among other resons like its discrection, because with this water we could do the launtry, cook or prevent fires. We were lucky for such a shiny blue sky that accompanied our constructive day.
The diversity of the spaces and solutions we found was just great, spontaneity and imagination helped us to find materials and construct with them.



Basic necesities were also taken into account. In the limit of the settlement, facing another lake, a toilet was designed with an old broken chair and a hole in the ground, with nice views and newspaper included. A plastic courtain provided a bit of privacy.



Once we had this green-effect roof, that provided us with light and heat, we invited our friends to come inside, they enjoyed it. Yasmin and I were not sure if going out to smoke or not, we didn't, it was a bad decision, in such a small house, and sharing it with another four people, you have to be so careful on what you do, more that usually.

In the night, we celebrated with warm fire and wine. Geraldine, Jasper and Stephan stayed for the cold night... so brave!!