Dear All,
Please join us for a Special lecture in the School of Design, titled:
STUDIO OTHERWORLDS: A PLANETARY MAP OF FAST FASHION
by Nitin Bathla and Sumedha Garg
Nitin Bathla is an urban researcher, artist, and educator based at ETH Zurich where he is currently pursuing his doctoral studies on a Swiss Excellence Fellowship. He has practiced actively in the domain of social design and urban research in India. Nitin’s work focuses on labour, housing, and land ecology. Aside from academic writing, Nitin works on film-making and community-based art projects.
Sumedha Garg is an artist, designer and educator. She has worked in communities across India and South Africa; on community healing and eco reparation through art, storytelling, nature play and integrated learning models. Her work lies at the intersection of art, design, narrative and sacred ecology. Sumedha is exploring the relationships between myth making, traditional knowledge systems, place making and people.
Studio Otherworlds is a socially-engaged art practice situated in Kapashera, a former farming village and now a tenement town located on the periphery of Delhi. Kapashera houses over 250,000 migrants hailing from Bihar, UP and West Bengal working in garment manufacturing under exploitative conditions. The project aims to intervene along the issues of migration, gender, land, and memory through firstly seeding a safe space for the community, and secondly, introducing a series of art engagements through which the members of the community become the producers of art.
Over the last six months together with the community of migrants in Kapashera, we have been engaged in a collective cartographic inquiry that attempts to disentangle material, ecological, and social memory. The piece - 'A PLANETARY MAP OF FAST FASHION' is a 3 meter high by 6 meters wide cartographic tapestry that narrates the agrarian history of Delhi's hinterlands and the story of its planetary entanglement.
The map not only makes connections between distant spaces on the planet that are entangled through the movement of commodities, capital and people, but also the journeys, desires, and collective memory of the women who embroidered it.
Between January and March, we are looking forward to bring this collective cartographic inquiry out of the bounds of our studio space and travel across the various public spaces and forums in Kapashera and Delhi. The presentation with the students of University will provide a great forum to reflect and transfer leanings from the process.
You can read more about the project at: www.studiootherworlds.com and follow regular updates on our social media pages - Instagram: @otherworlds.art // Twitter: @otherworlds_art // Facebook: @otherworlds.art