Locus - Metro As A Map

LOCUS: Metro as a Map

Emerging from a research conducted in the final semester of my Bachelor's programme around Narayanpillai Street, the installation of a set at the metro station was meant to be an example in immersive theatrical interventions, one similar to an amalgamation of a museum space and street theatre, points of contact of the private and public, residential-consumer-shopkeeper, children-adults, traditional-modern. It's presence inside the metro station was at once explicitly exaggerating the binaries that we struggle with on daily basis and at the same time presenting itself as a way finding tool that disrupted the binary.  I must say, as failed at executing this idea as much as I did succeed in publishing the research and findings of the process [See: Locus]

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BACKGROUND
The piece was imagined as a stand alone view, like that in a gallery space, a waiting area. It could also be interacted with or used as props and sets to explain as a place making exercise for the metro, a navigation tool for the surrounding landscape. The crucial anomaly in the study being that the museum is not a singular isolated body, but integrated into the daily, the lives of the commuter. Perceiving the commuters as constant inconsistencies to the landscape of Bangalore, this intervention looks to understand the outlet and reception of information through two mediums in a space not designated for a pause. 

Two essential intentions of beginning the project began with the need to bring information of the place and spacial awareness to the moving population, otherwise oblivious to the spaces they occupy. The pieces were designed to be spread across, like pieces of a puzzle was to bring a sense of play, while emphasising the spaces of vision that surround the metro's perimeter. 

Secondly, the hope was to create way finding identifiers through these pieces for cultural, historical and aesthetic landmarks for spaces around the city. Narayanpillai street was just a prototype of the community that surrounds the metro area and the influence it has had on the space. The metro is surrounded my Museums, Galleries, Aeronautical research spaces, the oldest trading streets, a recreational park brought to Bangalore by the British which today stands alone as one of the few lungs of "Green Bangalore" Each of these spaces have their own history, within themselves and connected to things that may or may not surround them. The covert idea was to slowly show these networks within the city between space and time.

Lastly, the spaces created worked towards testing the relational turn of the arts, stated by Claire Bishop. In her essay, Bishop discusses the growth of "Laboratories" and unconventional op-ended art, where “rather than the interpretations of a work of art being open to continual reassessment, the work of art itself is argued to be in perpetual flux.”. This is visible even outside the gallery spaces in the streets on India. The older areas today are being juxtaposed by new aesthetics and technologies that denote the turn in the aspirations and associations of the spectators. The aesthetics design this aspiration as much as the aspirations urge the designers to use these aesthetics. The test was to see, in a rather exaggerated capacity, this use of space by the commuters. The result was open to the installations being changed, developed, or even erased, which only illustrates Bishop's notion on the streets and public spheres of India. 

This brings forth questions of who builds the public, for whom is it designed, who gets oriented to it, and how in the articulation and re-articulation of spaces does the relationship with the place change over time. 

This project was done in collaboration with Art In Transit, a collective that works with public space interventions in the metro spaces of Bangalore.