BERLIN, GERMANY + MUMBAI, INDIA BERLIN + MUMBAI_URBAN INTERMEDIA: CITY, ARCHIVE, NARRATIVE

Berlin + Mumbai Urban Intermedia: City, Archive, Narrative explores new ‘intermedia’ methods for understanding the complexity and dynamics of contemporary urban environments. Focusing on Berlin and Mumbai the exhibition is part of an ongoing project of new approaches to the study of cities.
Focusing on ‘blind spots’, we explore sites and topics that are outside the conventional narratives and dominant conceptual frameworks of urban research, using new media-rich methods to bring those blind spots into focus. In particular, we use a range of technologies to bring physical and digital media — archival documents, digital data sets, photography, cartography, architectural drawings, graphics, text, animation, and film and video — into dialogue and interaction with each other. Through these methods, the distinct languages of different media interact at the deepest structural levels. They hybridize, and in the process, generate new ‘intermedia’ languages — and new ways of acquiring and producing knowledge about cities. These methods allow us to examine complex and dynamic urban phenomena through multiple critical lenses, and to visualize them in densely layered visual narratives that unfold in place and time.
The narratives in the two cities are bound together by common themes: they examine the interdependence of the planned + the unplanned and of formal and informal practices; the urban imprint of migration + mobility and the modalities of inclusion and exclusion; and the interrelation of nature + technology and of urban ecology and infrastructure. The exhibition explores these themes in Berlin and Mumbai through site-based intermedia narratives that challenge our understanding of urban environments and processes. The stories they tell are radically open to interpretation, elaboration, and the interactive construction of meaning by viewers of the exhibition.