From Chennai to Gokarna, a survey of India’s coastline reveals a diverse and fascinating landscape, changing fast due to the country’s growing industrialization: here are some of its multi-layered stories. A photo-essay from Gokarna by Selvaprakash via DOMUS
Cochin, Kerala, India. Sea wall
The coastline of India is 7500 kilometres long and there are nearly 250 million people living within a distance of about 20 kilometres from the shore. This massive expanse of linear land comprehends a wide variety of ecosystems, cultural and culinary traditions, fishing practices and natural resources. It is a diverse and fascinating landscape that tells the story of thousands of years of negotiation and cohabitation between man and nature. The fast growing industrialisation, however, is transforming the coast into an increasingly anthropised landscape and the balance of this ancient dialogue is quickly changing — with dramatic costs for both the people and the environment.
Koodankulam, Tamil Nadu, India. Fishermen protest near the proposed nuclear plant on World Fisheries Day. Local fishermen contributed money from their meagre daily earnings to support this protest against the nuclear plant
Selvaprakash has started his project of documentation of this fading world in 2008. He has travelled from Chennai to Gokarna to record the multi-layered stories that the Indian coastline tells. From the protests against the establishment of a nuclear plant in Koodankulam to the devastating consequences of the cyclone Thane on 30 December 2011, Selvaprakash’s photography grants care and attention to the details of a complex human and political narrative.
Ennore,Tamil Nadu, India. The sea is extremely violent in this area. A woman looks at the angry waters from her partially destroyed house
On your first or second visit to the City of Light, you may overlook the markets of all kinds that are a prominent feature of Paris. But at some point, when you have been to the top of the Tour Eiffel and the Arc de Triomphe, seen the Louvre and the Palais de Justice from the deck of a Bateau Mouche on the Seine, and subjected yourself to the musty attractions of the sewers and catacombs, markets will begin to appeal as a real and relevant aspect of everyday life in the capital city.
A visit to this flea market is a bit like peering in the windows of elderly neighbors who are about to move into a retirement home. They’ve kept everything from their marriages and their visits to foreign countries. Vanished passions are displayed like outgrown clothing, whether ceramic jugs or African wood carvings. Family traditions are displayed too: linen napkins with embroidered initials of earlier generations, and table settings handed down from mothers-in-law. You can’t help feeling a bit like a peeping Tom, but you can’t help looking.
In a different mode, take a trip to the fabric stores near the gleaming white domes of Sacré Coeur de Montmartre. Le Marché Saint-Pierre, the biggest and best of them, is in an old wooden building that houses five floors of fabrics of every imaginable color, texture, weave, and print. Le Marché Reine across the street is a strong competitor, but the prices, variety, and quality at Saint-Pierre make it the top choice.
Anyone interested in organic products will hear first and foremost about the Sunday Raspail market, but many of the same vendors sell their goods at the less touristyBatignolles market on Saturday. Located along the boulevard des Batignolles at the border of the 17th and 8th arrondissements, this market is one of the city’s best kept secrets.
Another of our favorite and lesser-known food markets is the covered Marché La Chapelleon rue l’Olive in the 18th arrondissement. Vendors offer quality items and a good selection, but equally interesting is the building itself. This splendid specimen of the architecture of Victor Baltard, dating back to 1885, may be the finest covered market still functioning in all of Paris. It reopened in 2010 after several years of renovations that restored the building to its former glory.
I have to admit, when I heard of a walking tour featuring street art in Paris, I was a bit skeptical. This is a city where every building, whether residential or commercial, not only has a distinct charm, but history as well. The thought of seeing the defacing of that, combined with flashbacks of my former city of New York covered in graffiti during the 1980′s, definitely left me feeling uneasy. Living a short distance from the tour and embodied with a curious, if not masochistic, temperament, however, I decided to join one of Street Art Paris’ Saturday morning outings, which start in the Oberkampf district, wind through Menilmontant, and descend through Parc de Belleville before concluding in its respective district.
It was an overcast Saturday morning when I arrived outside the Parmentier metro station to meet the rest of the group and our guide. After a year and a half of success in London, the company decided to start conducting street art tours in Paris this year. Our guide previously ran the tours in London and was a street artist himself, so he was incredibly knowledgeable from the start. The company also markets the tour to hostels, so the majority of our group was made up of young, artistic-type tourists. After a brief round of introductions, our group of about a dozen made its way down rue Édouard Lockroy, where we were shown our first piece and my view of what street art actually is, quickly changed.
As it turns out, the city of Paris is extremely liberal, and even welcoming, to street artists. The largest piece that we saw on our tour was done with the permission of the town hall. The artist Ludo is known for his style of combining painted grey mechanical elements with fluorescent green flowers to enact “nature’s revenge” on the city. The entire wall of a building in Oberkampf features this compassionate theme, as grey handcuffs hold down the stems while prison-like chutes constrict the flowers’ attempted movement. The acrylic painting has been up for close to a year and as portions of it begin to erode and take on new shapes from weather and time, the picture continues to produce new meanings on its own.
A Parisian street art tour would be impossible to conduct without running into the mosaic-tiled works of the artist, Space Invader, who has more than 1,000 delicately-crafted pieces up throughout the city, inspired by the 1978 Japanese video game of the same name. Other world-renowned street artists such asShepard Fairy, who developed the infamous “hope” graphic of President Barack Obama during his 2008 campaign, also have a presence in Paris. Fairy’s “Obey” series features a “big brother” figure regarding pedestrians below with a menacing, authoritarian glare. British artist Nick Walker, who often rivals his co-patriot Banksy, is known for his “vandal” character. Painted in all black through the use of a stencil, the character, in a black bowler hat, is shown on a bicycle fleeing the scene after “painting the town red.” The character carries a bucket of red paint that is also dripped onto the sidewalk.
