Amphibious:
Three Surrounds

With this research, Mriganka Madhukaillya and Maan Barua aim to formulate a different optic and account of urban life to those on record in mainstream theory. From an ongoing discussion they develop the concept of the amphibious – or life (bios) in its surrounds (amphi-) – to delineate the space-times and practices of urban habitation within and beyond capture.

Whilst canonical urban concepts derive from ground and built form, the amphibious outlines a different sense of inhabitation that wards off being apprehended in a singular – and definitive – sense. The project stems from thinking about urban worlds from wetlands: to generate understandings that are permeable, wobbly, and fluid, rather than cut and dried. It is steeped in Guwahati, a city in northeast India which, like Berlin and Chicago, Mumbai and Mexico City, has been built on wetlands.

The lecture performance that concludes the first part of the research unfolds through three accounts of the surrounds, focused on dwelling, incompletion and toxicity, respectively. These three accounts reveal acts of disjuncture, escape and opacity in terms of how the city is lived. This may not be sensed by the unitary logics of capitalist urbanization but which exceed the latter’s all-too-dominant efforts of territorializing the urban. An encounter between art and urban theory not only rearticulates urbanicity in light of the surrounds, but opens up possibilities of experimentation through which new lines of inhabitation and mutation might be invented.