Abstract This project explores urban transformation through a quiet, persistent lens of soil as a witness and as a feminist voice of dissent from the cracks of a rapidly transforming landscape in one of the most populated and culturally diverse countries.Through the practice of image-making, recording, drawing and observing at infrastructural construction sites in the city, the project listens to the cracks,the pits,the heaps of rubble,and the life it holds, revealing resistance in the liminal spaces between the increasingly contrasting binary of soil and concrete.To crack open is, to speak, to utter. In times of mainstreamed majoritarian discourses, social ruptures and normalised violence amidst the deceptive illusion of technological advancement, the observation of physicality of soil in the cracks, opens possibilities to listen to minoritised, generative force, challenging the aggressive capitalist force of exploitation, growth, and control that drives the current narrative of homogenous infrastructural development in an environmentally and culturally diverse context.
Through the textures,traces and marks in the physical space of cracks under flux, photographic and drawn observations of bodies-human and more than human,machines,lands and labour,forms and formations of soil,cement, stones and their variants,the project aims to pay attention to the uncertainty, vulnerability and the temporality of this endangered socioecological and political landscape under transformation, that the binaries of progress abandon.
The method of artistic practice is in being vulnerable, interrogative and persistent to become the cracks and the soil, countering the dominant linear narratives of progress by existing and witnessing.By listening to and from the cracks as a physical,representational and phenomenological world,the project invites sensing the transformation of the layered, heterogeneous, and alive earth we build on.