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Otherworlds at Kapashera
Otherworlds explores the complex & exploitative labour and class relationships in Kapashera – a tenement town that lies at the cusp of Delhi and Gurugram. It questions the meaning of home for people in a place that is in a perpetual state of flux and how the temporariness of livelihoods and belonging affects the lives of women in this space. For Otherworlds Nitin and Sumedha started out by repurposing an old abandoned warehouse in Kapashera to create a space which the women could view as a safe space for daily conversations. Proximity to garment factories meant they had access to a wide range of leftover pieces of cloth in all colours and shapes, and the gendered nature of the chore of sewing comfortably allowed the women to immerse themselves in this activity. What began on the scale of the intimate and domestic, expanded into a larger project when the women started challenging the cadastral map of Kapashera and its patriarchal representation of space. They began to create a 6 metre long and 3 metre high tapestry that allowed them to reimagine their own understanding of the space and their ideas of identity, belonging, displacement and loss.
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