In 2009, when we published a book called Soak and organised an exhibition of the same name, it was not just to redirect the future of Mumb...
In 2009, when we published a book called Soak and organised an exhibition of the same name, it was not just to redirect the future of Mumbai in the wake of the devastating floods of 2005 and the floods that occur each year with the monsoon. It was also to re-engage the past and present of a place in an estuary rather than on an island, an estuary where the monsoon and sea are at home.
We were consciously dislodging the “island city” of Bombay that we are all educated to see, an island city created in its past, present and future for colonial occupation and consumption, an island city that persists in textbooks, maps, census reports, novels, films, everyday conversations, and the origin myth of seven islands.
Most significantly, however, we were calling into question the drawn line that separates city from sea and cuts it up into numerous islands of properties and land uses. Mumbai in an estuary was another place, another time; and the exhibition of Soak at the National Gallery of Modern Art was an effort to seed a moment of pre-disciplinary imagination, stir a conversation, and ferment a transition in the design and understanding of habitation.
Of course, we were consciously appropriating the word...
