GHOSTS THAT WALK THE CITY
EPISODE 1: Flights of Fancy
Speculative project, Alternate histories, Exhibition
March 2019
Conflictorium, Museum of Conflict
Project initiated by / Ankita Trivedi, Ishita Jain
Role / Curator, Tutor
Team involved / Students of IDEA, Indus University, Divyarajsinh Rana, Priyanshi Pathak, Hanny Patel
Episode 1 titled Flights of Fancy, a 10-day speculative workshop conducted in collaboration with I.D.E.A Indus University, was the first instalment of Ghosts that Walk the city - a narrative-based historical research project. It engaged with the unseen shadows along the Ahmedabad Heritage Walk to observe and represent the fringe, the underground and the marginal on it, culminating in an exhibition which brought together eight distinct visual narratives from 3rd and 4th-year architecture students.
Using observation and speculation, this project through visual narratives explored key questions of commodity, age, power, market, authenticity, appropriation, politics, religion, control, beauty and identity and the roles they play in the construction of a grand narrative of Ahmedabad Heritage Walk.
This project also recontextualised the space of the museum by exhibiting localised narratives of priviledge and access into a museum that is situated in a communally strife neighbourhood. The mobility of this privileged community into a contested neighbourhood led to empathetic visibility of the conflicted stories.
A deliberate shift from the singular narrative to identifying untold stories led to the question:
‘Which stories make up ‘histories’?
