Radicle City: Snapshots of Bangalore

Arjuna Keshvani-Ham

October 30 to November 23, 2024

Deluge Contemporary Art

636 Yates Street, Victoria | Wed to Sat, 12 to 5pm 

Presented as an installation in the Deluge space, Radicle City is a cinematic essay which imagines a future in which Bangalore’s gardens no longer exist. Narrated as a poetic address by a voice who has grown up in a city without trees, the film’s hybrid documentary and fictional narrative recovers and reinterprets archive footage of an unknown walker’s journey along a park that marks an old line of colonial segregation in the city. This is an old border with new lines: today the city is India's "silicon valley," an IT hub at the heart of a network of global capitalism and one of India's most historically divided cities. Moving restlessly back and forth between past and possible future, the film is at once an investigation into the city's complex colonial entanglements and their afterlives, and an elegy to the city’s gardens, fragile spaces of resistance in a metropolis which threatens their destruction.