V. Chitra | Drawn into Life: Toxic and Tangled Intimacies along Mumbai’s Coastline

This event will be held both on-campus and online

The polluted waters that surround the coastal city of Mumbai are frequently characterized as “dead zones,” devoid of marine life. Within urban plans, coastal wetlands are seen as empty repositories for the millions of tons of solid waste generated annually, which often seep into the ground and mix in the waters. The seeming absence of life and the presence of toxic chemicals are used to justify the state’s infrastructural projects on the city’s edge. This talk draws on ethnographic research set in the context of this rapidly changing coastline. Moving between comics and text, it attends to the more-than-human possibilities that bloom along a chemical edge as pollutants and water mix with the humans, plants, and animals of Mumbai’s shore. It takes the coast as a site of multispecies encounters that simultaneously recall lively pasts, defy ideas of death in the present, and beckon contentious futures borne of toxicity and its chemical bonds.

V. Chitra is an anthropologist and visual artist based at the Australian National University. Her research intersects environmental studies, science and technology studies, and the visual arts. She has a PhD in anthropology from the Johns Hopkins University and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard. Chitra has a background in architecture and visual design and is interested in using comics as an ethnographic medium. Her first book, Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore (Cornell University Press, 2024), interlaces comics and text to show how technical images such as weather infographics, surveys, and plans remake Mumbai's coasts and coastal futures.

This event will be held both on-campus and online via Zoom (a link to the online stream will be sent to registered attendees).
The School of Art & Design Seminar series will continue weekly on Tuesdays from 1-2pm, between 16 July and 29 October 2024. 
The School of Art & Design Seminar Series is co-convened by Dr Alex Burchmore, Alia Parker, and Elisa Crossing.