City Games

Photos: Txt Collective

As per a 2005 High Court order, absentee sweepers could face imprisonment upto one month.

Photo: Prayas Abhinav

A young woman is at the crossroads of her life. Soon she must marry and start a new life. For a last outing, to momentarily push away the anxiety of the ‘familiar unknown’ of married life, she is allowed a trip to the local fair, with its giant wheels and fun shows and traders selling trinkets and other wares...

Photo: Txt Collective

"...when my father died a few years ago, we found amongst his papers an advertisement looking for a Burmese woman. Our father had been in Rangoon during the war and had escaped overland, you know, when the Japanese came in...

Photo: Monica Narula

When speaking of their reasons for migration, the women said, “Why do you call us migrants? Migrants were those who were obliged to go because they were poor. We are traveling.”...

Photos: Txt Collective

Different surfaces mediate our interactions with the city - newspaper headlines scanned over cups of tea, roadside signboards, the windowpanes of buses through which we glance out as we travel at varying speeds, walls overlaid with posters and graffitti, or inscribed with hand painted signs prohibiting them, postage stamp sheets purchased over counters that shut for lunch, late night crime shows on TV screens, forms filled during surveys and broadsheets with some images from the city... We pass by these surfaces, miss them, or glance at them momentarily. At other times we pause, look at them, or look through them at the city. And sometimes we carry them with us even after we have moved on, as that which is remembered. They become part of our personal archive of the city.

- Which city, which interval, which time?
  What different times does a city hold?
- Who are the most flexible inhabitants in a city?
- How does a city renew its territorial vows?
- When do strangers make eye contact with you?
- How is a city made to reveal its architectural secrets?
- What covers the collective memory of a location?
- What will you shade when you feel the seams of the
  city tearing?
- What remains in the exchange between the enclosed
  and exposed surfaces of the city?
- Can a city be a place for getting lost, and a place of asylum?
- How does the city calibrate its predictability between
  boredom and fear?
- When are you most alert to footsteps?
- Is "to be delivered" a permanent condition of the city?
- Is night ambient light a measure of the power of a city?
- Is the wrapping of interiors a measure of the shocks in a city?
- Is it possible to make a new city as if it had been there
  for a certain period of time?
- How does speed fragment a city into time zones?
- What happens when intended intersections lose their
  clear definitions?
- What are the invisible systems underwriting the city?
- Is the city flat? Can one fall off the edge?
- How far would one have to go to be outside the city?

Photos: Txt Collective and Anand V. Taneja