Maps as Stories: Walking towards a collective narrative

Walking Towards A Collective Narrative SWS-2015 Workshop School Of Architecture, CEPT University, Ahmedabad (India) Dec 1-17, 2015 Instructors: Gauri Raje & Shubhra Raje in cooperation with Anant Raje Foundation

Route 1: Sarkhej Gandhinagar Highway Route 2: Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar via Airport.Hansol.Koba Route 3: Highway 8 via Naroda

Our workshop is located within the peri-urban situation, one that characterizes a majority of rapidly urbanizing built environments. The “Badlands” - caught somewhere between. In conditions where the established indicators - visual or cultural - are absent, and where the inner landscapes of communities are unstable and fluctuating, we began by reflecting on the process of mapping by going back to raw landscapes (precursors to speculation) to ask, ‘what is the basis of observing and documenting such situations?’

We worked with methods used by storytellers in order to help us create and articulate the process of making multi-sensory maps. An important part of their practice is sensing the landscapes and mapping their stories. This could pertain to a plot in the story, it could mean a landscape which is a space of movement for their stories, or that in which their stories are grounded to evoke a lyricism of the landscape and a sense of tangibility of the land. By walking, thereby immersing (albeit momentarily), we return to our sensory basics. We are then bound to the land and its knowledge becomes embodied. A sense of place is arrived at, where ‘re-presentation’ is an act of (visual) translation between the embodied self and the mapping.

Our focus was to specifically excavate the understanding of ‘bounded space’ in making maps, for storytelling and architecture. Within storytelling, boundedness is important to be able to demarcate one story from another, and simultaneously is fundamental to creating connections. How might we use this understanding to create personal maps that are able to generate a context in dissipated landscapes with no apparent identity, such as the Badlands of our contemporary cultural and built environments?

Students were asked to make maps of two conditions over two weeks. Three groups of 4-5 students were a unit for investigation. Three routes between Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar were chosen as sites of investigation.

The aim of this set-up was to encourage sound, touch and smell maps of individually chosen sites along their route in the first instance; which then were articulated in terms of ‘sense maps’ of the entire route chosen by each unit. The individual sensory maps came together within each group through a process of accident and negotiation to create an enduring sensory map of the group’s chosen route. In the subsequent week, each group as a unit attempted to map a building along their route using the methods developed by them in the first week. In the last stage of the workshop, each group brought the sense of the route and the sense of their chose building into a constructed relationship.

Week 1 Mapping the Route

Week 2 Mapping the Building

Week 3 Construction

Lab: Mapping Heard Stories (non-verifiable)

Lab: Chinese Whispers

Presentation: Chunks of Stories vs.

Parcels of Information

Lab: Sound Maps of CEPT Campus

Presentation: Maps of the Imagined World

Lab: Exquisite Corpse

Lab: Collective Oral Story of Walking thru Ahmedabad

Lab: Constructions of the Building & the Route

Lab: Finding Negotiated Connections of the Routes Lab: Finding Negotiated Connections of the Building

1: Sarkhej Gandhinagar Highway Gayatri Menesh Nakul Vaibhavi Varun 2: Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar via Airport.Hansol.Koba Harshavardhan Kanika Shweta Silvan 3: Highway 8 via Naroda Aradhna Ayush Dharini Dweeta

Introductions: The workshop began with an introductory exercise to loosen the hold of ‘literate’ experience, and begin to interrogate the nature of the oral. By ‘literate’ experience, the facilitators focused on moving out of the dominant pedagogical paradigm of theoretical introductions preceding execution and realization of concepts. Instead, we asked the students in groups of 4 to practice telling, rather than writing, an incident from their lives. The theme was chosen to create intimacy, discomfort and negotiating between the two states of experience. The mode of interrogating the ‘oral’ was through the well-worn childhood game of Chinese Whispers. A perfect example to illustrate the changing fluid nature of narratives, and the sensory dimension of memory. What gets remembered are sensory impressions, while the arc of the narrative will necessarily change, no matter how ‘exact’ the listener attempts to be. It is the sensory nature of memory that leaves an impression on the listener, and feeds into the narratives or the re-creation of narratives as they are passed from one mouth to another’s ear, and so on.

Timeframe/ Structure: The exercise takes 45 minutes from explanation to execution. There is another 15 minutes for feedback of ideas and experiences, and for the drawing out of concepts.

The exercise takes place among groups of 4 students. Each tells a two minute anecdote based on a theme from their life to the person on their left. The listener then re-tells the anecdote to the next person as though it were their story, ie. The re-telling is in the ‘I’ mode. Each of the anecdotes thus, acquires several washes of the ‘I’ re-tellings until it returns to the person who told it first, ie. Whose anecdote it was. This person then listens to the anecdote observing how much it has changed and becoming aware of the process of externalizing one’s own experience that allows a new reconstruction to emerge. The feedback looks at how the reconstruction retains (or does not retain) the core elements of the experience of the first person. The feedback also examines what allows core elements to survive or get lost in the process of construction from a sensory experience to a reconstructed experience.

Maps as clues to imagined landscapes: The workshop then moved into a preliminary examination of the relationship between maps and stories. The first move here was from oral/ ‘heard’ stories to crating representational maps of those. The objective in this session was to demonstrate the idea that the mode and content of maps need not be about tangible verifiable units of information, but mapping is a human activity containing clues to imagined landscapes and non-verifiable experiences to create coherence for human communication and sharing.

Time frame/ Structure: 10 minutes per mapping iteration Students were asked tell a story they had heard. The focus of the stories here were non-autobiographical stories. They could be stories from films, folk tales, fairy tales or myths that the students had heard rather than read. The stories were then told to a partner over 10 minutes. The timeline aided in focusing the energies not to remembering the details of a story; but rather to paring down the core elements of a story without which it becomes a different story.

Telling permitted the story to be voiced and witnessed; which allows a story to embed itself, and not remain within the ambiguous realm of individual musings.

In the next 20 minutes, students were asked to visually map the story. ‘Mapping a story’ is a standard practice among storytellers. Mapping a story does not necessarily involve a focus on the plot of the story, but is an arrangement of images, textures, plot arcs, sounds and landscapes of the story. It enables the storyteller to recollect and familiarise themselves with a story long after they first came across it, in a succinct manner.

Students attempts at mapping required two iterations as they clarified for themselves the possibilities of mapping from an oral imaginative space, and their attempts to move away from habituated methods of ‘remembering’ stories through plot arcs. The concept and necessity of working with the medium of representation whether they were film roles, colours, charcoal within a delimited space of A3 size paper were introduced and explored, and would be revisited many times over the two weeks. Additionally, the concept of time within sensory experience was explored, as were notions of time as more than linear time and the possibilities of representing non-linear time visually.

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1

2

Four attempts to ‘pare’ down and map a story

Aradhna

3

1 First iteration

1 First incomplete iteration

2 Second iteration: Exploring possibilities of detailing and indications to cyclical arcs of the story

2 Exploring what it means to embed a map into a story

Ayush

Dharini

1 First iteration mythical anecdote

of

a

well-known

2 Finding a single motif as a narrative thread of the story in visual language

Dweeta

1 First iteration 2 Exploring the significance of the medium to the story

Gayatri

1 First iteration 2 Exploring the nature of time in the visual mapping

Harshavardhan

1 The staging of a story

1 First iteration

vs

2 Exploring movement arcs within a story

2 The embedding of a story within a landscape

Menesh

Nakul

^

1 First iteration

^ 2 Exploring within a story

borders

and

movements

Silvan

< 1 First iteration: Exploring simultaneity < 2 Committing visually in the mapping

Shweta

1

Linear narrative

2 Freeing the story from a plot narrative into images as a narrative

Vaibhavi

1

First iteration

2

Paring down of a story

Varun

This exercise moved the students from maps as clues to imaginative landscapes to the concept of sensory mapping. The CEPT campus served as a lab wherein the students could attempt mapping a demarcated zone (3m x 3m) through one of the senses. The task given involved mapping through the auditory sense and creating sound maps. The task also asked of the students to create the maps from within this zone over 10 minute repeated iterations. The students had 2 hours in total to create these maps.

Repeated iterations also allowed the students to explore and develop their language for visually representing the auditory landscape within their area on CEPT campus, refine this language and over various time intervals create a map with multiple layers of sound. The intention was to employ this method along each of the three routes chosen by the students between Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar for the rest of the workshop.

Timeframe: 10 minutes per mapping iteration

Faculty Presentations

Faculty presentations served the mode of anchoring the activities, work and findings of the week. Each was an hour long taking place at the end of each week. Presentations were followed by hour-long discussions with the students on the concepts presented at the talks.

On narratives, stories and narratives of the landscape:

The talk focused on the distinction between narratives and stories, as well as information and stories. For this, much of the talk focused on Walter Benjamin’s distinction wherein ‘....the value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new...A story is different. It does not expend itself....’ Discussions were centered around this idea, making connections with mapping as a non-informational activity, so that, maps were iterations of ‘chunks of a story’ rather than ‘pieces of information’. This meant that much of the student work on sensing and mapping on their routes, and especially, within their individual sites on the chosen routes involved a process of inhabiting, and paring away what seemed an occurrence of the moment, and what sensory data was more enduring. This, then, required and intense familiarity with the site, and ‘inhabiting’ of the site through the physical body rather than any other externalized social or cultural data. ‘Listening’ as a concept and activity became key to the work of creating maps in this workshop.

Illustration credits (Above, from left, clockwise):

Japao (1972), Waltercio Caldao; America Invertida

(1943), Joaquin Torres-Garcia; Mercator Map (first published 1569); Dymaxion Airocean World Map (1954),

Buckminster Fuller & Shoji Sadao; Map Of Paradise (2002), Hendrikje Kühne and Beat Klein

On maps of places, perspectives and imagination:

This is was the second faculty talk of the workshop, focusing on the efficacy of technique and the power maps possess for construing and constructing worlds. It introduced students to some of the ways in which habitual conventions condition spatial hierarchies and power relations. Students were also introduced to the notion of “mapping paradise” through history, suggesting how mystery, and desire, might be returned to a world of places and things that have been otherwise excessively classified and structured.

Each technique of mapping can be legible and ‘correct’ in its depiction of spatial relationship, but the reader must first learn the relevant mapping codes and conventions employed by the mapmaker. Conversely, no mapping technique is inherently stable or ‘true’, a concept significant with the ubiquity of GIS and new computer technologies.

The nature of the senses: The workshop urged the students to reflect and investigate the nature of each sense. In other words, they were asked to look at the questions of how different the world would seem if it were entered through a sense of the sound (soundscapes), through the sense of smell (smellscapes) and a sense of touch ( touchscapes)? How would the visual representation of each of these senses translate into?

What was the nature of sound or smell or touch, that would create maps that were not mere extensions of the visual maps that prevail? One of the elements specific to sound, and smell, was the aspect of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;lingeringsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. The boundaries of sound and smell are, to that extent, much more porous and fluid than those of sight or touch. The students were asked to investigate how the fluidity of boundaries of specific senses would affect the ways in which their sites and buildings were comprehended, and the ways in which these would need to be incorporated into their modes of visual languages or mapping.

Sensory Mapping The most dominant mode and discourse on mapping has never questioned certain assumptions in the contemporary discourse---that maps inadvertently refer to the overwhelming presence of the visual sensibility; and, in slightly more academic discourses, also draw on cultural narratives to make a landscape familiar. In the process, map-making seems to leave unrecognised the predominant encounter within it---that of the interaction of the physical body with the landscape. It seems as if the complexity of discourse has sacrificed the most basic encounter of humans with their environment and landscape, and assumed that a landscape cannot be known unless all the informational elements and cultural narratives have been incorporated.

In a land that is overlaid with sensory elements such as India, the workshop was curious how making sense of the landscape with non-visual senses such as sound, smell and touch would affect design interventions by students of architecture and design.

To this extent, groups of 5-6 students were asked to choose one of the three peri-urban routes between Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar. At the first stage of the workshop, each of the students chose a zone of 3m x 3m along the routes and mapped them through the day at ten-minute intervals. Students began early in the mornings and continued until dusk. The task took place over a week. Each student was asked to work with two senses from the three stated above. Students could create these maps while seated at a point in their chosen site, or move along the site to add the element of multi-sitings in their area.

In order to facilitate and intensify the sensory perceptions, students were asked to work with one sense for a period of time (eg. the whole morning), and focus on sensing for 10 minutes. Each mapping over the time period was to take place at 10 minute intervals. In shifting from one sense to the next, students were asked to demarcate a distinct period of time and activity to allow the body to change focus. Deliberate intervention of another activity, such as eating lunch or resting for half hour or more, allowed the body to shift from one sense to the next.

The focus then was on iterations through several maps of the same zones to allow the shifts in sound, smell or touch to occur at various times of the day.

The focus, then, was on gathering maps with â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;thicknessâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; of sensory data that stretched over time rather than at one point in time.

Negotiated Connections of the Routes After 4 days of fieldwork, and mapping along their selected routes, the students were asked to bring their individual iterative maps in composition to create a ‘mapped sense’ of their particular route. The timeframe was led to 5 hours for the first iterative attempt. This was intentional with the objective of exploring the modes through which collective narratives and maps can be created. Two modes were highlighted in this exercise: the first, arriving at a collective map through negotiation and intentional construction of connections; while the second, through accidental coming togethers.

The students undertook two iterations of this exercise, depending on the issues that emerged through the first iteration. Students were instructed to make use of as many of their individual iterations as required, not restrict themselves to the last, or ‘best’ version. The emphasis was not on re-creating the route visually but in keeping with the sensory mode, creating a sense of the route.

In other words, a sound map, a touch map and a smell map of a route would necessarily be completely different, when translated visually, from a visual map of a route.

Timeframe: 3 hours + Lunch These discoveries were further enhanced for the students through two exercises: a.

Exquisite Corpse b.

Walking through Ahmedabad - A Collective Story

Route 1: Sarkhej Gandhinagar Highway Gayatri Menesh Nakul Vaibhavi Varun

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Collective Map of Route 1 A linear organization of the individual mappings. The maps came together sequentially, based on the students positioning themselves adjacent to each other along the linearity of the route. The collective map then makes for a linear progression, navigationally along the route creating movement through the weight, density and textures of the senses mapped. > Panel Details: Finding individual visual languages for various qualities of sounds within landscapes and along routes, attempting to find continuities/ resonances between individual languages to create a narrative of the route.

Route 2: Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar via Airport.Hansol.Koba Harshavardhan Kanika Shweta Silvan

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Collective Map of Route 2 A map that illuminates the progression as well as the depth of senses within the landscapes of the route. The students called upon the instrumentality of stacking, used individually as a means to introduce time, as a fulcrum about which various strands of narratives are supported.

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Panel Details: Exploring how various media re-create the quality of sound within landscapes.

Route 3: Highway 8 via Naroda Aradhna Ayush Dharini Dweeta

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Collective Map of Route 3 A constellation of sounds (the primary sense mapped by the group), revealing a persistent thematic recurrence. The resulting map is a character map of the route, rather than a navigational one. > Panel Details: Sound not mapped as “frequencies” or “loudness”, but resonances, thicknesses or the qualities of sound, and as overlays of various sounds.

The game of Exquisite Corpse (or Picture Consequences) is a collective drawing exercise.

It involves sequential drawing of a section of an entity (a body, a building, a city) by each player. Each section is drawn in secret, folded over and passed to the next person to draw the next part of the sequence. The last member also unfolds the composition, and gives it a title. We played two sets of games.

The first involved drawing the head/torso/body/ feet of any living creature. In the second, we worked with roof/upper floor/ground floor/ basement. Each produced unlikely figurations, generated by the same kind of accidental coincidences that the Surrealists loved.

Timeframe: Groups of 4 players. 1 minute per section. 4 sheets per group, so that at the end of each 4 minutes, 4 exquisite corpses are created.

In a game of Exquisite Corpse, the normal, consistent narrative - and style - of a drawing of a person is ruptured. A different hand imagines and draws each body part on each fold of paper. The whole image is only known at the end when the sheet is unfolded. The things we expect the body to have - to belong, say, to a consistent genome, sex, class or occupation - are all mixed up by fragmentation and multi-authorship. Applied to the logics and codes of architecture (and urban planning), the same ‘impossible’ bodies emerge by distorting and disorienting our most familiar of referents, playing out personal, cultural, or social anxieties and desires on unwitting anatomies. But there is no transgenic impossibility to these visions. Sure, we can (yet) have a creature with a chicken’s head, a corporate executive’s torso, a duck’s legs and a rat’s tail, but we can, if we choose, engineer a building or a street with exactly the same level of difference.

It would offend all our convictions of what architecture and urban planning are supposed to be. Their qualities are, instead, anti-logical, un-visionary and revel in accident. Yet we could argue, that many of the apparent logics of architecture and urban planning are simply codes of convention, and that accident and un-logic are real tools that can help us out of the self-replicating horror of contemporary design.

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Top, from Left: “The Secret Chambered Villa”|”Roof-top Residence”|”2 Faces”|”Regular Urban Icon” Bottom, from Left: “The Monstrous Mermaid”|”Chik-Dragon Man”|”The Mysterious Hen”|”Ele-Chic-Feet”

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Top, from Left: “Panduck”|”----”|”The Peds”|”A Horse with a Q Back” Bottom, from Left: “An Incomplete Mosque with a Secret Dungeon”|”Magic Mushroom”|”House Truss”|”The Shift”

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Top, from Left: “The Floating Hut”|”Fake-Ore Hall”|”Indoor Sports Complex”|”Long Rural Mystery” Bottom, from Left: “Deadly [oh sorry] Quatro”|”Jumping Roar”|”Armless Dogphant Ballerina goes neighhh!!”| ”Muscular Juggler”

Route 1 In looking at the two ways in which collective sense narratives can be arrived at, the workshop then moved towards a specific practice of creating sense maps with the intentionality of it being a collective narrative construction from its inception. Over 4 days, students were asked to select one building along the route between the entire team of 4-5 students. The students, then, had to work on creating sense maps of the building and work out a methodology for doing so.

The principle of mapping remained the same: 10 minute intervals between sensing and mapping, and a larger interval between moving from one sense to another while mapping. The methodology for creating a collective map of the building could be a balance of various elements of accident and negotiation.

Each group worked differently based on the dynamics of the group and the visual language of each of its members. While group/route-1 evolved a methodology wherein each member was a part of each round of mapping; group/route-2 worked on individually mapping the building with their senses and then creating a collective map. In the group along route-3, each of the members worked predominantly with one sense map of the entire building.

Creating maps of buildings along the route Timeframe: 3 hours + Lunch

Route 2

Route 3

Building along Route-1: Vaishnodevi Temple Mapped using sound, touch & smell

The students in this group evolved a methodology that was an adaptation of the Exquisite Corpse game introduced in a previous session of the workshop; concentric maps with a circular promenade architecturale, emerging as the narrative diagram. The soundscapes constitute the outer rings, whereas the more intimate senses of touch and smell create the center.

Two variations of sound maps inscribe the mappings of touch and smell. The first - a linear narrative, establishing an underlaying tempo. The mapping of this base tempo was assigned to one member. The rest of the group members participated in collectively mapping sound by overlaying their sound maps sequentially, at each of the selected locations, on the same sheet of A3 resulting in expressing rhythm (time), densities and qualities of the building sound-scape.

The smell- and touch-scapes were a staggered overlay. The promenade architecturale was divided into 5 segments; members simultaneously mapping one segment, working with the sense of smell. For the next sense (touch), the members shifted one segment clockwise. The individual narratives of the smell- and touch- scapes were overlaid for each segment, creating a composite narrative that included two voices per segment. The mappings of each segment were organized to create the inner ring of the circular promenade.

Building along Route-2: Shamiyana Restaurant Mapped using sound, touch & smell

The group utilized the smell-scapes as an underpinning (structure) to pull together the other localized narratives of the building.

Individuality of artistic expression meant that the making of the collective took cues from the tactile sense of each visual translation.

Compositional responses to the material and voids within these translations were an exercise in recreating the sense of the built - but the sense of thresholds, of boundaries and of enclosures referred to in the built environment were not generated through the visual; instead were influenced by the particularities of the sense of smell, touch and sound. The spatiality of the built was comprehended as the presence and absence of these senses. Heaviness and lightness acquired new meanings; a visually rich and variegated space often presented a sparseness (a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;thinningâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;) of the other senses, yet in other instances the smell or sound lingered beyond the visual thresholds between spaces. Senses also overlapped, with touch resulting in sound; sounds were occasionally followed by smell and smells carried by the breeze inducing touch. Such overlapping is interpreted by the group often as fluidity - of flows and eddies - rather than juxtaposition, which would be the norm in the visual sense.

Building along Route-3: Jain Temple Mapped using sound, touch & smell

Each student individually mapped the entire building for each of the three senses, the collective map becoming a form of re-mapping using the most appropriate selection from their entire set of maps. The primary instrumentality was one of collage and juxtaposition.

Deep concentrations, of sounds and smells, form the heart of the building narrative, reflecting the particular character of the building chosen.

Touch, on the other hand, is portrayed to have two characteristics within the site. A cyclical nature is observed and mapped with regards to the movement of the sun, and shadows cast. This is represented by juxtaposing a suspended â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;temperatureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; wheel, that literally moves with the breeze, creating varied relationships with the sounds and smells portrayed. The second type of touch is one that defines a distinct transition, between the precinct of the building, and the space beyond. Its location in the collective map, at the edge, evokes the edge of the map as well.

The creation of a collective story is another of a storytelling exercise. It involves working with both negotiation and accident. Requiring a large group to work with, each person in the group contributes to the story by adding one line. The members of the group have their eyes closed, and hence addition to the story requires intense listening to the images being created by each person in the group.

Negotiation does not require verbal agreements or debate. This mode of negotiation requires listening, and creating a common ground through which a story can emerge. Each person gets up to 3-5 turns. The story is built up not just through creating images through words. Descriptions are the most significant device for creating images; however, images can be created by alluding to textures, sounds, smells and other sensory elements.

Creating Collective Constructions of the relationship between the routes and the buildings:

The final 3 days of the workshop were dedicated to working with all the iterative maps created during the two works by each of the students, working individually and in groups. With each iterative map being a moment in time along the routes for the students, the final stage of the workshops involved students working in groups based on their routes to identify: a. paring down and selecting from among their route and building maps to distinguish between what seemed visual representations of ‘pieces of information’ and ‘chunks of a story’: although each of the iterations is significant as a sensorial moment in time along the route, to create a sense map of the route, the students were asked to identify moments that represented both the endurance of a sense element and identify the accidentals or transient moments along the route. b. the relationships between the building to the route: in keeping with the theme of exploring the nature of the peri-urban, students were asked to examine the relationship of the building to the route they had chosen. The building could have been representative of the route, or emerged as a point of pause from the intensity of movement along the route, creating a different ‘sense’ along the route. Thus, it became necessary to find modes of arrangements to construct a map of the route that would give a sense of the place. The two-dimensionally of paper was not always found to be adequate and students began to explore the multi-dimensionality of their exhibition spaces as a way of creating a ‘thickness’ of representation. In this final stage, students not only brought their individually-created maps together, but were also asked to create a composite map from all of their sense maps. This required establishing a relationship between the various sense maps from their sites, and along the routes. In order to take into account density, textures and fluidity of the sense maps, it became necessary to move into three-dimensional maps, rather than working with the dominant language of two-dimensional its on paper.

Exhibition of Constructions

Venue: Corridor between Planning Studios & Sagra Basement, CEPT.

Route 2: Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar via Airport.Hansol.Koba Harshavardhan Kanika Shweta Silvan

Route 3: Highway 8 via Naroda Aradhna Ayush Dharini Dweeta

Route 1: Sarkhej Gandhinagar Highway Gayatri Menesh Nakul Vaibhavi Varun

Route 2: Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar via Airport.Hansol.Koba

Route 3: Highway 8 via Naroda

Route 1: Sarkhej Gandhinagar Highway

Feedback from Students & Suggestions for further work: At the end of the workshop, five eminent architects, social scientists and those involved in music and the arts were invited to a special preview of the students’ work. This was an opportunity for the students to interact with faculty other than the course leaders. The discussions were extensive over an hour with the invited guests getting an opportunity to engage with the students and their methodologies. Based on the discussions, the course leaders received interesting and valuable feedback to take the course forward in the future.

Some of the feedback points follow: 1. As a pedagogical approach to create an awareness of the relationship between human living and the environment one finds oneself in, the workshop seemed an exciting beginning. It needs refining in terms of the length and the complexity of the exercises introduced. One of the suggestions that the workshop facilitators will be working on over the coming year concerns the diversity in conditions of the day. A concrete suggestion was to take students out to the site for a number of days and spend all the time there, to facilitate an ‘immersive experience’. Currently students were at the site from dawn until dusk. This is an aspect that the workshop leaders are contemplating at the moment. The workshop facilitators are also considering creating a studio-length course from this workshop to create a longer time for students to engage with the landscape with all their senses, rather than the 10 days that they currently have within the workshop time-frame.

2. On a theoretical level, there were many questions regarding the inclusion and selection of certain senses such as the aural, smell and touch and exclusion of others such as the visual and linguistic (in terms of already existent cultural narratives). The workshop aims are clear that this workshop focuses on developing a language of the senses that begins with the senses that are not part of usually predominant senses employed for mapping in informational/ functional maps and/or theoretical social science discourses on mapping the land.

This is the reason why the workshop has chosen field sites that are in peri-urban zones, ie. Zones that are actively in the process of developing and articulated discourse in, what is seemingly, an unorganized manner. Focusing on cultural discourses or visual discourses risks the danger of inadvertently falling into structures of already articulated discourses. Moreover, the innovations in this workshop over time will emerge from developing languages of inhabitation and expression through living in and creating a dialogue between the body and land, and discovering already embedded discourses on the body, habitual practices and where such habitual practices and embedded discourses fall short of newer patterns of inhabitation.

3. A valid observation that the facilitator’s intend to develop in the next set of workshops was on the move from individual languages of mapping to a creating a collective language. We intend to focus more self-consciously on processes of refining and articulating the arriving at a common language from individual experiences of group members. To an extent, a disjunction remains in communicating the maps of the senses to viewers at the exhibition, since in part this requires a self-aware immersion of the viewers into the idea of the language of thus-far unarticulated senses themselves. However, a more self-conscious articulation of the processes create to bring together a collective language of experience would bring in further refinement and depth to the workshops.

4. Student feedback: Based on the SWS feedback sheet, student feedback has been positive. The workshop seemed to have intimated new lines of inquiry, and new ways of familiarizing themselves with the site before design and building.

It seems to have created an awareness. Among students of initiating their own methods for getting to know the site landscape along with the more conventional maps to begin to create a sense of the site and its environs as a precursors or to design. Some of the spoken and written feed backs had indicated to the intention of students to carry the learnings and modes of inquiry initiated by this workshop further.

5. Another concrete feedback which the workshop facilitators intend to build into the workshop concerns a felt need among students to engage in more bodybased exercise work as a precursor to fieldwork. This is something that the workshop leaders will be building into the structure of the workshop in future.

Š 2015 Anant Raje Foundation