Sumedha Garg & Nitin Bathla
Otherworlds explores the complex & exploitative labour and class relationships in Kapashera - a
tenement town that lies at the cusp of Delhi and Gurugram. It questions the meaning of home for people
in a place that is in a perpetual state of flux and how the temporariness of livelihoods and belonging
affects the lives of women in this space. For Otherworlds, Nitin and Sumedha started out by repurposing
an old abandoned warehouse in Kapashera to create a space which the women could view as a safe space
for daily conversations. Proximity to garment factories meant they had access to a wide range of leftover
pieces of cloth in all colours and shapes, and the gendered nature of the chore of sewing comfortably
allowed the women to immerse themselves in this activity. What began on the scale of the intimate and
domestic, expanded into a larger project when the women started challenging the cadastral map of
Kapashera and its patriarchal representation of space. They began to create a 6 metre long and 3
metre high tapestry that allowed them to reimagine their own understanding of the space and their
ideas of identity, belonging, displacement and loss.
Settlements like Kapashera have emerged through their entanglement with an ecology of planetary fast
fashion. They wanted to collectively reflect on this ecology with the women's collective from the
community. They decided to use the cadastral map of Kapashera, a tool which allows patriarchal
control over the settlement of Kapashera as a figure for the collective tapestry. Over the months
of September to November 2019, the seven sisters women's collective produced a collective tapestry
which reflects on these planetary entanglement of Kapashera and explores alternative narratives of
its transformation and entanglements with the life stories of the migrants.
Image Credit - Khoj Studios
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Image Credit - Khoj Studios
Image Credit - Khoj Studios
Image Credit - Khoj Studios
Image Credit - Khoj Studios
Image Credit - Khoj Studios
Image Credit - Khoj Studios
Image Credit - Khoj Studios