Concrete
Discontinuities
A collaboration with artist Raisa Galofre
Among the tensions within its multilayered spaces, the overwhelming traffic, its restless inhabitants, bright lights and endless shadows, an infinite vocabulary of forms and materialities, urbanity finds its form and still always continues to change.
Concrete Discontinuities is a non-linear visual narrative developed in dialogue with the artist and photographer Raisa Galofre and during numerous forays into the various urban landscapes of Bangalore.
Thematically, we explored the spaces between public and privately owned, between the historical and modernist, and the state of continuous becoming. The images reveal a correlation between modernity and coloniality, the dependence of a Western-influenced idea of progress on the work of countless workers who move from construction site to construction site as nomads who are employed around the glass palaces of the IT parks, work in the informal sector, who keep the many engines of the city running. Bangalore - the Garden City as it once was called - is now the IT hub, the Silicon Valley of India.
Every idea carried into the city leaves traces in the materiality of its urban spaces, drawing boundaries, connecting, casting shadows or bringing light. The photographs in this series draw a portrait of Bangalore by gathering and contrasting the most diverse urban surfaces, between documentary and staged imagery.
This project is a collaboration with artist and photographer Raisa Galofre and was developed as part of our BangaloREsidency at the Goethe-Institut Max Mueller Bhavan in Bangalore.
© Marvin Systermans — Berlin