Flamingo Coast — Inhabited Sea

Flamingos as seen from Koli boat at Airoli, Thane Creek

The arrival of the flamingos paints the otherwise industrial, working eastern seafront of Mumbai, into a soft, public edge, covered in bodies of delicate pink, beckoning birdwatchers and picnicers. Flamingos seek gentle, sheltered waters, and a particular threshold of salinity to inhabit.The practices with which flamingos inhabit the terrain, bring into question many imagined notions - of pollution, of conservation and cohabitation, of body and environment and of coast.

Along the Sewri and Thane Creek, the flamingos arrive to feed in the muddy, saline waters, as their breeding grounds (in Kutch and elsewhere) dry up. Flamingos feed on larva, small insects, blue-green algae, mollusks, crustaceans, and small fish tha…

Can the flamingo practice of feeding allow us to perceive the coast as the meeting of saline and fresh waters? The flamingo redraws the coast at a threshold of salinity concentration, constantly changing, with the monsoon and tides, the gradient and…

(L) The coast from Mumbai to Kutch is redrawn and straightened, making visible the mapped ‘edge’ of land - the high tide line. (R) Sections are cut through the same strips used to straighten the coast, revealing the topography of the straighte…

Illustrating the undivided continuity of body and environment, the greater flamingo’s (Phoenicopterus Roseus) feathers turn pink through the pigments they eat from their environment. In Mumbai the flamingos present a challenge to ideas of pollution …

The straightened coast is analysed for meeting of fresh and saline water, through an analysis of slope along the strips, potential environments which flamingos may inhabit are retained while unsuitable environments are cropped out. The resultant drawing adds measures of salinity and strength of tide to the satellite imagery.

The flamingo as it feeds and inhabits the aqueous terrain, asks us to consider another imagined coast, one drawn through the bodies of the beings that inhabit this dynamic coast, the mangroves and grasses and waders, that each have a unique means of dividing sweet waters from salt, a coast across salinity. One that is drawn at a particular threshold of salinity.

Salinity