Tide

Worli Koliwada stands amongst the few remaining active fishing  villages in the metropolis. Caught within a growing city that threatens to consume their commons and livelihoods, the Kolis are drawn into land-based battles by a paradigm that denies the continuity of land-sea and the permeability of the coast. Battles which do not protect them from inland pollution invading sea waters, infrastructure changing tides, rising temperatures and eroding coasts. 

The sea is constantly drawn on land’s terms, our mean sea levels measured from a datum on land, and shorelines drawn by assuming a solidified sea. In Mumbai the highest low tide is often higher than the lowest high tide, these fluctuations of an aqueous monsoonal terrain are erased by standard cartography. Maps continue to operate on geography rather than time, enforcing an imaginary unmoving, unchanging coast - permanent and rigid.

The drawing redraws the straightened the coast in terms of the tide. The orientation of the coastal ‘edge’ was mapped to determine how and when the tide meets the shore. The resultant plotted coast is rearranged to keep time with the tides, adding perspective to flooding, sedimentation and corrosion. Redrawing land through the perspective of koli dol nets that anchor themselves in the dynamic tides, constructs coasts within temporal and material time, reshaping the hegemony of geography.