In the materials presented here, it shows how the Urban Sea is a deeply contested, amphibious space. On one hand, the municipal government continues to colonize the edges of the terrestrial city, filling these regions with the profits and prerogatives of real estate. On the other, fishers negotiate the dynamic qualities of the sea even as it is increasingly made of warmer waters, concrete, sewage and more unpredictable ecologies.
The photographs and the two video presentations here stage this tension. The first video presentation dwells in the ongoing histories and processes of land expropriation that make Mumbai at considerable cost to its indigenous fishers and non-human residents. Massive coastal infrastructure projects seek progress by flattening, straightening and drying the city. The second video explores how Koli fishers deploy linear and cyclical spacetimes to reveal fish. Fisheries are the spaces that become and move with the festivals and the tides, with prayers and the sun.
Fish, fishers and fisheries, however, are not outside of the city’s history. They continue to be affected what Amitav Ghosh has called, “the great derangement”– in this case, large-scale landfill and infrastructure modernization projects. This is not a one-way process. Amidst the restive monsoons and seas of climate change, some engineers are increasingly concerned that these massive infrastructures, like fishers and ecologies themselves, can only be as tenuous and impermanent as the urban sea in which they are staged.