From shveta at sarai.net Wed Jan 16 16:34:16 2008 From: shveta at sarai.net (Shveta) Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:34:16 +0530 Subject: [cm_public] A background and an intimation Message-ID: <478DE4B0.60102@sarai.net> Dear All, Happy new year. We are starting 2008 with several new practices, innovations and ideas. Enclosed is a short background text from the last 6 years of Cybermohalla, and also an intimation of the coming phase. We are planning a substantial consolidation of resources for CM, so suggestion and forwarding is welcome!! More updates will follow soon. On the 21st (Monday), the renowned writer in Hindi language Ms. Krishna Sobti, in her appreciation of the book "Bahurupiya Shehr", will meet the writers and give a contribution to them. The event will be in Sarai, at 3 PM. All are welcome. Looking forward to a more interactive year. warmly Shveta on behalf of Cybermohalla ---------------- Cybermohalla A background Voices from Delhi’s margins, speaking of fragile, quasi-legal and ever-precarious holds on the city pose serious questions about its emergent destiny. A city of about 14 million, drawn from every major region of the country, linguistically and religiously diverse, host of the forthcoming Commonwealth Games and the site of speculative land economy, mega-malls, gleaming new transport infrastructures and among the highest per capita incomes in the country, Delhi struggles to cope with its many pasts and multiple presents. It functions as a symbolic city, fashioning itself as a shining capital, an emerging global city, but also simultaneously as a productive city, through processes formal and informal, in conditions of work rivaling global standards as well as the worst of Dickensian oppression, producing for global and local markets through networks that are legal, semi-legal, illegal, dense, transparent, regulated and unregulated, all simultaneously. It functions too as the site for new capital investments, providing opportunities in the new service economy even as factory-based production is challenged through environmental concerns and smaller retailers lose out to corporate retail chains. A vibrant civil society, new technocratic managers and representatives of the political society jostle for space to influence policy and cultivate support-bases among its diverse publics, while violence becomes endemic to the experience of the urban order. There is little about the city that can be predicted linearly. Everything about it suggests that we need to open fresh lines of enquiry and make possible a multiplicity of voices from various embattled social sites, where theories of modernization, development and urban regeneration can be rethought. Over the last six and a half years Sarai-CSDS has had a deep engagement with the reading and writing practices and cultures in different urban settlements in Delhi, through Cybermohalla, which is a collaborative project with Ankur: Society for Alternatives in Education. This engagement began in 2001, with the activation, in LNJP colony, an informal settlement, of a one room space as a lab with basic technology of three Linux operated computers, a dictaphone, a still camera and 15 young practitioners, between the ages 15 and 20 years, from the locality. The idea was that if the space can draw a relation between writing, researching, experimenting, and tap into different forms of knowledge, modes of cultural expression and infrastructures of circulation of these within the neighbourhood, then it will be able to build new grounds of knowledge. Over the years, this experiment has evolved into a network of locality labs in different settlements. (LNJP – 2001, Dakshinpuri – 2002, Nangla – 2004 to 2006). A vast range of practices have evolved at these labs – writing and listening to one another daily (on memories, conversations, observations, own journeys, journeys of people they like, biographies, logs of the daily, etc); reading; recording conversations in the neighbourhood about daily life and journeys into the city; collecting printed materials (flyers, pamphlets, cards, calendars etc); engaging with the different forms of writing in the locality (from personal diaries, letters received and archived by someone, cuttings from old newspapers and magazines preserved by someone as a scrap book, bills, documents, etc); building conversations with people who have textual practices in the locality (poets, diarists, story tellers, someone who collects materials, someone who visits libraries, printers and binders). Through these, and a host of other practices evolved in these nodes, it becomes possible for each node to build a dense vocabulary and relational world of ideas and concepts. It is into this that newer practitioners are invited, and older practitioners who may have left to work, eg, sometimes return to share their writings. Within the neighbourhoods, 400 young people have passed through the labs, each having practiced at the labs from between a few weeks to a few years. At any given point of time, there are around 25 practitioners in each lab, and a group of 20 older practitioners (with an experience of between five and seven years at the labs) has emerged. About the neighbourhoods LNJP is an informal settlement that grew on a half cemetry, half dumping ground in the late '60s, and now has grown into a settlement of over 60,000 people from the East and the North. See “Galiyon Se/by lanes” (2002), by practitioners in LNJP, for a dense, textural account of the neighbourhood. (www.sarai.net/practices/cybermohalla/public-dialogue/books/galiyon-se) Dakshinpuri is a post-emergency resettlement colony of over 400,000 inhabitants from different informal settlements in Delhi who were forcefully relocated here in the late '70s. It is presently under deep transformation due to enforcement of the urban plan and high end real estate developments in the neighbouring areas. Nangla Maanchi was one of the largest settlements on the bank of the river Yamuna, transformed from a fly ash deposit into a lively settlement by its inhabitants. Nangla was demolished in 2006 to make way for the new Riverfront, and some of the settlers have been relocated to Ghevra on the far North of the city. See blogs by the practitioners, http://nangla-maanchi.freeflux.net in Hindi and http://nangla.freeflux.net (translations into English). Ghevra is a resettlement colony still in formation, where twenty settlements will be relocated in the near future. Cybermohalla practitioners have shifted to Ghevra to search and set up fresh terms of engagement in this new corner of the city. Writings and reflections at the labs have been kept in a constant circulation within the localities through different print forms – monthly wall magazines, biannual broadsheets, occasional booklets, stickers, postcards, and through setting up different occasions of dialogue through wall writings, playing radio programmes and audio CDs from recordings, transmiting short videos over cable networks and hosting locality events. Sometimes these circulatory forms take on a very sharp edge and are able in intervene in very difficult times. For instance, during the demolition of Nangla Maanchi. When the demolition of the settlement began, a whole body of writing was done to engage with and bring alive the experience for a wider public, on a daily basis. A broadsheet was produced, 10,000 copies of which were circulated in the localities and from bus stands; a blog was set up and translations of the writings were posted on it daily. In 2007, Rajkamal Prakashan, one of the most established publishing houses in Hindi, published “Bahurupiya Shehr”, a collection of stories, essays, reflections and blog entries about Delhi by 20 practitioners. The book has been very favourably received in the Hindi public domain, and is considered a valuable contribution to Hindi literature [1]. Writings at the labs are constantly put into newer circuits of circulation through translation into English, through mailing lists, blogs, books, publication in books and journals like the Sarai Reader, Naked Punch [2], Almost Island [3] etc, through producing works for different contexts (eg installations in art exhibitions [4]), through inviting dialogues with practitioners from other contexts [5], and on Sarai's website (http://www.sarai.net/practices/cybermohalla) Resources generated through this six and a half year engagement to think about the city have earned for themselves a certain publicness [6] and have traveled through diverse circuits [7]. Writings from these neighbourhoods are slowly being acknowledged as being critical to understanding transformations in the contemporary urban. The question with which we move towards a new beginning is, how can we reinvigorate and invent a modality by which we can do justice to the complexity of the available and potential intellectual and cultural life in these various neighbourhoods. Different possibilities of an infrastructure for this exist within a locality. Some were implanted into the very structure of the locality by the city administration in the initial decade of the formation of the localities, which have since become defunct or dormant. For instance, a small outpost of a centralised library system, community centres that exist in every neighbourhood and which are used primarily for functions like marriages. There are the annual and traveling fairgrounds and performative forms like Ramlila. Some structures have emerged, tied to vocation, but echo with intense longing for other possibilities and spaces – like new media infrastructures of cable networks, CD copying and exchange centres, music bands and DJ networks that accompany festive occasions. And some are just unavailable – publishing houses, publicly present forms and sites of reading, sites practicing design innovations, etc. Taken together, these constitute the possibility of an architecture of intellectual life and cultural expression in any locality; and in the next phase, we envisage researching into the various dimensions of these established, dormant and unutilised structures and networks of cultural life, to re-animate them with newer forms of interactions and materials. We venture into this experiment with an awareness that possibilities inherent in the lives in the neighbourhood can only be realised through opening out and innovating on structures of 'gathering' and 'doing' together. Therefore, on the one hand this will mean searching possibilities of a flow of new content through those circuits which are already alive in the neighbourhoods. Simultaneously with this, we envisage the creation of structures (like Hubs, Labs and Studios) and temporary forms (such as meeting places, performing places/events etc), making these a stimulating mode for people to come to, learn in and contribute to. These processes will keep the question of rethinking and reimagining models and structures alive. We also realise that there is a deep need for imagining infrastructures of cultural life in the world today wrestling with social inequality and cultural difference, and see this experiment as responding to and speaking with this need and this urge. -------------- [1] Anyatha (Issue November 2007) and see reviews here http://www.sarai.net/practices/cybermohalla/public-dialogue/books/bahurupiya-shehr [2] http://www.nakedpunch.com/ [3] www.almostisland.com [4] N5M4, 2004 (http://www.n5m4.org/), Leading from the Edge, 2005 (Wagga Wagga/MGNSW, see http://www.regionalartsnsw.com.au/news/e-bulletins/e-bulletin_05_nov.html), “A Wall and a Sofa” in “Building Sight”, 2006, show curated by Raqs Media Collective (see www.raqsmediacollective.net/buildingsight.html). [5] See for instance “Pages” (http://www.pagesmagazine.net/2006/daily_pages.php?lang=en&date=2007-02-07) [6] Writings from Cybermohalla are also part of an NCERT textbook and used as teaching materials in legal studies and urban studies courses. [7] Siddharth Varadarajan http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/thscrip/print.pl?file=2006060301841000.htm&date=2006/06/03/&prd=th&