Gigi Scaria: CITY UNCLAIMED
© Gigi Scaria
“ CITY UNCLAIMED” is yet another individual process of coping up and adapting to the urban settings of Delhi by artist Gigi Scaria. Gigi embraced this city as a youth, after growing up in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Over these years surviving a totally new life in Delhi, he recreated an extremely personal and gradually evolving relationship to this rapidly expanding and accepting city.
Gigi is a multi faceted and multi disciplined artist, who’s use of photography and video are an attempt to add a deeper and a thought provoking meaning to his visual language. The photographs seem to disconnect the foreground and the background as if two worlds are inconspicuously trying to establish themselves and their identity within the same space, while the videos somehow entagle the two worlds. The videos throw the viewer into the surreal world, where one cannot differenciate between one’s reality and the subconscious.
Through his efforts to understand this rapid evergrowing tension of claiming and reclaiming of spaces, he somewhere feels that “the cultural past of the nation and its diverse classes in form of urban and rural, class and cast, religion and practice and the endless list of eccentric and idiosyncratic exchanges of different social groups somehow create its own mystery in any urban space in India”.
Innumerable communities occupy the metropolitan cities, of which a large chunk are a result of constant migration from different parts of the country. These communities try to grab on to their own old values from their historical past, yet requiring the comforts of a modern life and a booming modern economy, which in the process is constantly erasing, redrawing and changing the spaces within the city recreating it’s map over and over again.
Gigi’s engagement with the process of his visual monologue can be termed as a socio-political discourse, creating a context of varied notion of aesthetics among the inhabitants of the city. The city that consists of so called displaced citizens from mixed cultural backgrounds amalgamating their diverse sensibilities, influences and lack of cohesion into a collective chaos.
Though Gigi over the years has found his own peace and acceptance from being an outsider to an insider dealing with the continous changing city, yet many questions emerge about it’s future, which will remain an unending speculation and a quest that will always decipher into many ways of exploring and expressing oneself.
© Sandeep Biswas, 2019