seven isles unclaimed is a speculative fiction regarding the reclamation (or lack thereof) of land masses for the city of Bombay (now Mumbai). The stories accompanying the images are loaded with factual data from the State Gazetteers. This allows the viewer a free reign in choosing to believe or discount the narrative. The project follows a trajectory of flash-points in the history of the city when specific incidents in the colonial timeline triggered reclamation of land. Bombay was then but a series of 7 isles. This project speculates the city condition if those trigger points in the timeline leading to reclamation were never achieved/realised, leaving the islands unclaimed. These drawings chart this alternate trajectory, leaving Bombay not a peninsula as it is today, but a series of islands with a very different architectural, social, environmental, economic, not to mention physical landscape. In image, machine, map, and transnational collaboration the colonial and postcolonial drives of rational mastery to “reclaim” productive, rentable land from untamed water are interrupted, displaced, retold, and reimagined.
Collaboration: The work has broadly 3 main sections:
~ The first being stories accompanied by drawings (the artist Ranjit Kandalgaonkar’s speculative artwork and collaborative work of two beirut-based printmakers, - Tarek Salhany & Polly Phipps Holland),
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the second being diagrams which perform as tools to speculate (my work), ~ and the third being a digital mapping exercise which include amongst other things, a fake map section (programmers Sanjay Bhangar, Tim Waters, Karen Menezes & Sajad Anwar).
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The conversations with Dr. Amitabh Rai have been most inspiring for us to ‘speculate again’