THE PROGRAM

In their long and prolific collaboration, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari introduced the concept of a Body without Organs – a term borrowed (yet re-defined) from the French playwright Antonin Artaud. Deleuze and Guattari re-define the BwO, comparing it to an egg, which has a somewhat consistent shape yet carries with it a reservoir of potentials, networks, and qualities. They explain:

“The body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these particular vectors.” (Capitalism and Schizophrenia p.19)

In A Thousand Plateaus, they further elaborate and expand on the shapes and forms of this Body without Organ – classifying it into three categories the cancerous, the empty, and the full/healthy BwO. The cancerous BwO is caught in an endless vicious cycle, the empty BwO is un-productive, and finally the full BwO is productive explaining:

“This is how it should be done. Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjuctions here and there, try out continua of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO.” (A Thousand Plateaus, p161)

Mumbai can be seen as a Body without Organs, a city with no punctuation marks but constantly moving with no particular (or so it seems) direction. The real-estate market acting as a cancerous BwO – constantly speculating, inflating, creating bubbles with no end, the residential luxury high-rise towers as empty unproductive BwO, and finally the slums as a full and healthy BwO where people flow and produce without a looming hegemonic hierarchical organization – hierarchies are made, broken, re-defined, re-territorialized in continuum.

Programmatically, the project strives to become a full BwO, even within its possibly “empty” or “unproductive” programs.  With three elements overlapped the project comprises of a time-based structure of steel I-beams carrying workshops and informal markets, and two constant components the conditioned stores and shops and the infrastructural transit bridge carrying the entertainment programs. The aim is to provide the infrastructural matrix for the highly productive slums to re-territorialize and infiltrate their surroundings. Therefore, the introduction of workshops into the commercial space does not intend to eliminate their existence within the slums but rather their expansion into their immediate environment. The steel structures allow for the 6x6 modules to be re-adjusted with time according to varying needs (accessibility, height, area etc.) The structures are rotated to face the East for maximum sunlight and in accordance to the most productive orientation according to the India planning strategies the Vastu Shastra. The shops and stores stand massive, static, and un-changing at each level, after a long meandering promenade through the workshops. Finally the transit landscaped bridge carrying the entertainment activities (theater, stages, food courts etc.) connects surrounding public assets which otherwise stand locked away, barricaded behind a tall fence – the Colaba Woods and the shores of the Indian Ocean.

The purpose of these three programs is to re-evaluate capitalism and its alienation of the producer. An attempt to bring the full and healthy BwO, the highly productive and skillful individuals living in the utmost poverty, to the empty rotten BwO, the luxury malls where individuals and citizens are transformed into consumers and eventually commodities. The aim is to invite people to be exposed, re-awaken their awareness to their realities, and start a discourse re-vitalizing the public realm.