Muddy Waters
Saamia Makharia
Muddy Waters: Deconstructing Mumbai's Coastline
The project explores the colonial transformation of Mumbai's coastline, emphasizing the ongoing terrestrial colonization of nature. Highlighting the duality of language in British cartography, it examines the resultant domestication of Mumbai’s watery landscapes through projects that seek progress by flattening, fixing, drying, and straightening the city as against material practises which reveal a gentler, more fluid reality.
Learning from enclosures of water and the power held within them, with a focus on Mumbai’s colonial Breach Candy Club, a series of similar structures are designed as counter-strategies. However, unlike traditional, static, gridded enclosures, these new enclosures—a temple tank and a tidal park, both located at former coastal forts—function as Trojan horses, deliberately designed to yield to nature over time, bringing the flow of water back to the coast. Offering entry into an alternate ground—dynamic, aqueous, and constructed in time rather than static geography—the project aims to recondition the surface, opening it up to radical new possibilities waiting to be reclaimed by displaced ecologies at the center of the city’s ongoing histories of land expropriation. Releasing the forces of water, the project counters the speculative logic upon which the city was built, destabilising constructed cartographic lines and associated land-sea binaries whilst planting the seeds of the former muddy archipelago.
