Austrian architect brings Dharavi to life

It's not like your regular exhibition. There's no colourful 'art' on the walls or people standing with wine glasses, amidst chatter about the artist. As soon as you step into Studio X at Kitab Mahal, you get the feeling that you're being watched. A mind-boggling number of pictures – of men, women, children, houses, maps – adorn the otherwise deserted walls of the room. Empty oil canisters, piled one on top of the other line the floors. Objects like jump ropes, rangoli colours, fried snacks, bangles and drawings by children rest on top of the canisters. A clothesline hangs above one of the sections.

It's easy to guess that the curator, architect-designer Martina Spies, has tried to recreate the mammoth-sized Dharavi with Dharavi: Places and Identities. There's a painstaking amount of detail, maps indicating public spaces at Dharavi, floor plans and a projector showing videos of the residents making brooms. Spies has spent the last two years doing her research on what others deem as Asia's largest 'slum', a word she has an issue with. “It's in informal settlement where so many communities live and thrive. I've measured each and every house in the area,” she says.

She has focused on four distinct communities – Hanuman Chowk, Dhobi Ghat, Broom Maker Lane and Muslim Chowk. Apart from the pictures, there are individual boards that trace the development, living ways, sociological mapping (ownership, density, income per day) and problems of the communities with text and pictures. For instance, the Hanuman Chowk board explains the lives of the papad-making women who come from lower tribes while Muslim Chowk talks about the migrant Muslim residents who are united by their religious beliefs. Spies talks about the residents getting fed up of foreigners who come to the area and but never do any concrete work for their development. She visited the hometowns of several dhobis in Andhra Pradesh and also showed them the exhibition.

What separates Spies work from the countless others on Dharavi is her goal – she's starting her own NGO, Anukriti, to help build playgrounds for the children of Dharavi. “It broke my heart to see children playing in the polluted air near the leather tanneries. The settlement has just one small playground, and that's a part of a school,” she states, adding that she now has strong ties with all the communities. She dedicates the exhibition to the strong residents and says, “Dharavi shouldn't be romanticised. It doesn't actually need the help of developers but just creation of hygienic spaces.”