Our Parking
- a21devvratsingh
- May 1, 2024
- 2 min read
Mentor : Radha RH
Parking is a ubiquitous phenomenon in our present-day cities. With growing car sales and infrastructural projects across the country to make driving easier, parking is an unavoidable encounter people have, irrespective of whether or not they own a car. In this course, we engaged with this phenomenon of parking in Borivali and other parts of Mumbai, by documenting aspects of it, designing research around particular areas of interest, and by responding creatively to things we found.
Process and Reflection
The imagination of designating a space for parking in the city remains reserved for the elite and bureaucratic bodies only. For the larger masses, a space for parking becomes rather a volatile entity up for encroachment.
The multiplicity of ways in which the spatiality of a space reserved for parking transforms into a space for recreation, festivities, and hosting.
The course began with phrases that could be associated with parking in the most unexpected ways. As we wrote and discussed questions from these integrations, they broke our conventional ideas of space, mechanics, politics, and social convention.
“Can the parking ground turn into a sour plate”.
“Is my city an etched parking lot?”
“Can I kill someone for parking?”
“Who parked God here?”
Here questions of morality, social norms, and space started to upturn for me. I wanted to think of the possibilities of parking with crime or with the idea of God. How do these socially charged phenomena entangle with the urban condition of parking?
Prompts and ties:
Parking x Amusement Park
Possibility of parking ramp becoming a slip and slide
Parking x Maze
You are driving a car in maze like parking lot you see a sign that says exit but it leads to a dead end. How do you get
Out of the parking lot ?
I took this further as an opportunity to investigate the nuances of feeling agony, hate, and such radical idiosyncrasies over parking in the city. I'd like to explore the whimsy these emotions charge and to look for the parking as a never ending maze.
Project
A Sluggish Endeavor
Parking as an activity when especially conducted in a parking lot full of sluggish cars and people along with a lot of annoying unnecessary road signs like ‘One way’, ‘No Exit’ make you feel stuck in a parking lot as if it is a boring, annoying game. What we have tried to do here is express that annoyance using stop motion animation as a technique in the video/film medium.
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