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City [In] Visible 2008
City [In] Visible was an art project that generated dialogue and narratives in collaboration with local communities in Khirkee about the lived realities of the migrant working class in Delhi's shifting urban landscape and the relationship between labour and the metropolitan space.
About this edition
City [In] Visible was an art project generating dialogues and narratives with local communities in the neighborhood of Khirkee village.
These communities exist on daily-wage earnings in small workshops and factories as labourers, stall attendants, and artisans. Though barely seen, they remain a crucial demographic variable within the rapidly expanding and impersonal cosmopolitan ethos of high-end shopping complexes, business centres, and corporate habitats. Within the relentlessly mutating metropolitan landscape today, the migrant working class is subject to various powerful modes of alienation even while the city enlarges these communities’ frames of reference, deconstructs small town and rural prejudices, offers a range of new affiliations and new possibilities of personal freedom. Both hostile and hospitable, this paradoxical space of seductive modernity and burgeoning new capital is a dramatic arena of technological efficiency, fetishism, affluence and material fixation, as well as an interface fostering human connectivity and the creation of significant informal local networks that allow people to survive in the absence of secure work.
The primary site for the execution of the residency art project was Select City Walk, a major shopping complex across from Khirkee village.
