MAPPING DELHI
2021-2022, as part of the exhibtion Urbane Räume: 4 Perspektiven at the Zentrum Architektur Zürich Bellerive, Zürich, Switzerland

Mapping Delhi - Work, Urban Space and Memory on Textile" uses the medium of tapestry to make visible the connections between urban environments and socially engaged art. The art project by Studio Otherworlds was created in Kapashera, an industrial fringe area of Delhi. The project involved a collective of female migrant workers who work under exploitative conditions in the local textile industry and live in dense tenement neighborhoods. Former agricultural landowners have built up such barracks quarters on their urbanized agricultural land and operate them for profit. The migrant women workers in Kapashera inhabit these barracks in a state of permanent temporariness. Composed of hundreds of small, psychogeographic maps, the tapestry represents an embroidered "counter-cartography" to the women's habitat. The object traces a network of local and global reference points intertwined by the movement of commodities, capital, and people. But it also accommodates itineraries, desires, subjective perceptions of the architectural environment, experiences of gendered violence, and the collective memory of the women who embroidered it. 

As a means of appropriating one's own living space, the cartographic tapestry traces the stories of the place and its people; at the same time, backgrounds and questions about migration, memory, gender, urban reality, and living space come into focus. Furthermore, the work provokes a critical examination of the concept of "fast fashion" and its sociological as well as spatial effects.

TEAM
Sumedha Garg
Nitin Bathla
Seven Sisters Collective (Saat Saheliyan)

ASSISTANTS
Leonie Wagner
Bhavyaa Parashar
Aishwarya Ashok

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Christian Schmid
ETH Zurich
Khoj International Artists' Association, Delhi
Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin

This project was supported under the "Peripheries and Crossovers" programme of KHOJ International Artists' Association.