Look into the past for answers to the present crisis

Through her photos Pushpa Arabindoo, an associate professor in Geography & Urban Design at University College London, shows how Chennai and Madras are entangled with each other to conjure a unique sense of urban life, each essential to the other, in a material and representative sense. Her research documents urban transformations, using her investigations to engage with broader urban theories on the urbanisation processes.As a collaborative exercise, the exhibition, titled, ‘Spectral City: Excavating Chennai From Madras’ is curated by Pushpa and Christophe Delory, a French photographer.
“I am collecting all the materials and putting them together in the book that I am working on. Every time I visited Chennai for the research, Mr Muthiah would say, ‘Why don’t you put up an exhibition during Madras Week?’ And this time, it all panned out well. The six themes in the exhibition are chapters from my book — Sheltered Dreams, Public Matters, Wasteland, Hydropolitics, Hinterland and Statecraf. These topics emphasise that shelter continues to remain a dream, the idea of the public is still elusive, nature blurs with waste in unexpected ways, water has become a rare commodity, the city’s limits are tested at scales beyond our imagination, and the state crafts its urban presence through the everyday and the spectacular. They unravel myriad ways in which opportunities for improved situations appear and disappear, promises are made and unmade, leaving behind visible yet spectral footprints. Operating as a visual essay, these photographs are more than an archive as they attempt to capture the contrasting yet overlapping topographies of Chennai and Madras, focussing on recovering their present rather than the nostalgia of their past,” says Pushpa.
Spectral City: Excavating Chennai From Madras, @Edouard Michelin Auditorium,
Alliance Française of Madras, 24, College Road, Opposite Good Shepherd School,
Subba Road Avenue, Nungambakkam, from 9.30am to 6pm, till Aug 24