Sawda Ghevra, Delhi 2016. Mixed media performance installation.
10 years after Where is Nangla Maachi? this exhibition and associated events worked with the displaced comminities of Nangla and other demolition sites across the city to commemorate the acheivements of 10 years of building a new neighbourhood by reflecting on the journey so far through sounds and other objects that have travelled with the people of Sawda, as well as the sounds and places left behind.
Built brick by brick from an empty piece of land over the last 10 years, Sawda Ghevra is a thriving resettlement made by residents displaced from different parts of the city after their previous homes were reduced to rubble in New Delhi’s pre Commonwealth Games ‘demolition drive’. From improvised tents, to bamboo structures, to brick huts and eventually finished houses; Sawda Ghevra’s inhabitants have, over the course of a decade, re-built livelihoods and made homes on their tiny allocations of land.
In the proceeding week Delhi Listening Group’s ‘Listeners at Work’ traced a route across the city from the Nangla Maachi demolition site out to Sawda Ghevra starting on Monday morning and concluding on Saturday afternoon with the exhibition opening and a listening tour.
The installation comprised objects and stories contributed by the local community which had come with them from their old locality, collected by the Saawda young womens writing group with Delhi Listening Group; bricks from the Nangla demolition that I had kept for ten years since the installation Where is Nangla Manchi?; documentation of our journey across the city over the proceeding week; documentation collected locally over ten years of the commity’s milestones; a local listening tour & a 4 channel soundscape of sounds from Nangla and Sawda collected over several years.