A lecture by Kaiwan Mehta
Walking the neighbourhoods was a way of resolving the conflicts of history, reading through a bodily and visual engagement with the material worlds these neighbourhoods had produced in layers over time – you read in that materiality – in its expression, its style, its construction, its ornamentation – the everyday responses to human lives’ experience of history, of time, of place, of being – whether history hit us hard or quietly – it creeps into our lives in obvious ways and subtle gestures… all these are captured in the details of our material world – the ornamentation in architecture, the weave in fabrics, the patterns of our everyday existence expressed and all encompassed in the neighbourhoods, and in the neighbourhoods of our minds. The mind is never a nation, the mind is home and dwelling, the mind is a neighbourhood… it grows from the geographical location of the body, and in its conversations with ideas and imaginations, realities and myths, it travels to worlds and constellations beyond the physical body; the home is beyond us and the body is the wandering centre, it wanders in neighbourhoods, as it remembers and looks for home always, it shapes contexts while it continually expands boundaries, because the body moves in time and space, the biography is the cosmos, and the self maybe a place to dwell in.
The lecture draws an arc through many explorations vis-a-vis the self and the city, dwelling and belonging, via the tropes and subject of Home and the Neighbourhood. From the publication of Alice in Bhuleshwar: Navigating a Mumbai Neighbourhood (Yoda Press. 2009) to the doctoral research on architectural surfaces and urbanity, between ornamentation to neighbourhoods, to the many narrative and experiential explorations across various forms of being inside-and-outside of spaces, migration and belonging, memory and alienation, in neighbourhoods and spaces of shared living and their difficulties and pleasures.
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