[en]counters is a yearly initiative exploring since 2010 issues related to Mumbai’s urban landscape and encouraging creative ideas & actions that have an impact on and transform the city’s everyday life.
[en]counters – land(of)mine, an art project in public spaces that interrogated the very idea of land in Mumbai. During their urban interventions, the artists reclaimed spaces through guerrilla actions, burial rituals, marriage processions, they recorded memoirs of altered landscapes, drew lines that marked appropriated paths, celebrated cycles of birth and death, occupied nomadic zones, campaigned to repossess our city. Inside, they ferment and branch out into new forms as they cope, copulate, and conceive.
Soil as territory, ground and heritage, acts as the gluing agent connecting the works within to the outside and becomes a metaphor for recasting foundations from where new areas of hope and dialogue arise.
When we place art in complex situations, what emerges are prototypes celebrating the point of intersection between the vertical development of urban structures and the horizontal expansion of social relations.
Thus, by questioning the absurdities of urban planning and development, by investigating the thick networks of solidarity and despair defining Mumbai's relational fabric, by exploring one's sense of belonging and possession, can art become a tool to re-consider, re-envision, re-make our cities?
Trespassers Only invites a shifting of the city, where the forgotten and unnoticed peripheries of Mumbai become the new center, the breeding ground provoking new ways to experience or imagine our living and lived spaces. This is the walk into a forbidden place where migration, belonging, identity, dislocation, possession cram together as they clash, devour, rot but also negotiate, engage and blossom into an opening of new discourses.
