Worli Horizon — Inhabited Sea

From the land based perspective the sea is dynamic - swelling and shrinking, racing and crashing, and yet the horizon lies completely rigid, a line where the motion of the sea stills into an infinite edge.

The Worli fort offers views across the horizon of the city and sea, its location simultaneously within and beyond both sea and city; the quintessential transitional space, the city’s balcony. From the fort the city and boats are all just breaks in t…

On a Koli boat, swaying and oscillating with each wave, the horizon loses its sharp edge and ‘land’ its resolute constancy. The boat and the tide are one, unmoving with respective to each other, bringing into sharp focus the fact that all motion is measured in relativity.

The horizon fractures, splices, tilts and moves as the boat rocks. The boat aligns identifiable structures on a kinetic land with the changing constellations in the sky to turn and navigate the shore and seas.

Traditional types of Koli Boats - now mostly replaced. The shilpil - smallest of boats, a companion to larger boats at sea, or a vessel to hug the coast and reach the trawlers moored deeper, the hora to carry 9-11 people, for midscale daytime operat…

Visibility is never a reliable condition for the kolis, with the city’s growing smog seeing is an even more skilled art. Smog on a late winter day in Worli, obscures all navigational signs on the shore and in the sky.

For a koli boat out at sea, the land and tide are never geographically stable, always shifting and moving with the oot (low tide) or bharti (high tide) and the cycles of poornima and amavasya. The pull of the sea, vaan, changes seasonally, following the moon’s shadow play and the rise and fall of constellations, dictating times to fish and time to rest. The thresholds drawn by Koli practices too are in perpetual motion, they inhabit a material time, rather than a cyclical / seasonal one - an immersion in the temporality of wetness.