The exhibition explored the human quest, anxiety and fear of that which is anonymous and unknown, and the constant struggle to make it comprehensible. Travelling to places, and trying to explain, imagine, and represent them; or the attempt to describe and pursue objective clarity (or otherwise) in the description of places/cities are exercises symptomatic of the “frustrations of man’s inability to grasp the unknown.” Various texts, archived as traces of texts, and human attempts “to grasp the unknown,” were duly archived and catalogued to proxy methods of knowledge representation and construction.

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The project starts with two points of reference … exploring the question of understanding a city other than Bombay/Mumbai but with the same tenacity as I understood Mumbai, the city I lived and worked in, and researched; where in the process, one characteristic aspect that emerged was encountering strangers that were again very familiar characters in the city story but yet were strangers to me; rather we were strangers to each other, but yet they opened up for me ways of seeing the city. Any city as such is familiar, but not “Stuttgart” or “Prague,” they are specific entities. The home is a familiar terrain, we all know, and we may all think so, but every home is a very personal terrain. The encounter of the terrain that is foreign, is not about being “new” neither about being unfamiliar, but about the journey to familiarity.

At the primary level the question is about familiarity, and how one can achieve it. Essentially, familiarity seems to be the antithesis of that which is unknown, the anxiety of not knowing; and human quest, journeys, research, and travels have been to deal with the anxiety of that which one does not know, the fear of “not knowing,” the fear of the foreign, the fear of the stranger.

To take the question of the “stranger,” one notices that Jane Jacobs in her classic text, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in the very first chapter, defines a city through the character of “strangers.” She says: “They [cities] differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.”

Having made these remarks, one also needs to then discuss further how the unfamiliar or that which is incomprehensible is made into the familiar, where the argument often is on interpreting the unfamiliar object through the experiences of spaces and objects that one has always been familiar with. This process, and the argument, does not go further to say anything at all of the foreign terrain, the terrain approached with fear and anxiety by virtue of it being the new terrain. What possible ways could lead one to understanding the new geography, making it comprehensible? Possibly, the comprehension will always be on shifting grounds, yet it can lead to moments of “knowing” the object. Victor Segalen approaches the issue with “to say what I think of the Chinese (about whom, frankly, I think nothing at all), but to imagine them and not in the pale imitation of a ‘documentary’ book, but in a vivid and realistic form beyond reality, as a work of art” (quoted by Ian Buruma in his preface to: Victor Segalen: Rene Leys. New York 1988). It is clear here that the fear of encounter is not negative at all points, but could be the moment of pregnant anxiety.

The anxiety to negotiate the city with strangers produces the narrative of the urban space; the space of the sidewalk is a result of the anxiety to deal with characters you want to recognize but actually do not know. Negotiations of looks, loitering, buying-selling, walking the crowd, etc. produce the sidewalk, the neighborhood, and the city.

With these conversations, one could also say, that the encounter of the foreign or the new, could denaturalize the home terrain, or the familiar terrain, once again putting the familiar into the space of anxiety, rather than comfort and hence casualness.

The library created for this exhibition/project was a mock collection of extracts from various texts—literary, biographical, travelogues, fiction, and some images and postcards collected as a traveler. The extracts selected were always in the process of negotiating either a place or a character, dealing with the world of the unknown contained within that story-telling object—place or character.

As much as these pieces are extracts from texts describing a world, this collection is a potent fantasy place itself; this collection is a description of a geography that one encounters through reading and fantasy, imagination and memory. The strangers are many, but the collector is one, who now holds every piece as the potential speck to a whole new world inside that story, that description, or they come together in various permutations to constantly make new phantom stories, and hence new places and characters.

Cities are very close to such collections and narrative structures. Memory and anxieties are at constant play in creating spaces, places and characters, and with that a structure of recognition, fantasy, and distrust is also always being created. The negotiations between all these create narratives that accumulate further, producing cultural terrains and cities, homes and neighborhoods, stairways and dining tables, alleys and shops, vendors and bar tenders: a plethora of stories. How and in what form do these stories come together? Are they always in random conjugations? Or do they have narrative structures that often prevail over others? If so, what is that process of understanding these cumulative narratives?

The narratives are always located, in sites and locations, but they also exist in some form as abstractions. In this pendulum moment—specific to abstraction, exchanges between familiar terrain and the foreign geography is crucial in producing knowledge about places and cultures, and the self.

This exhibition (installed in two parts at two different locations in a building, one at a door and the other at a window), and the resulting “Black Box” which houses all the extracts like an unbound book, is a process towards understanding cities that are “not my city” through the rendezvous of a “stranger.”

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