A unique 'interactive web documentary' wants you to explore 360 degrees of New Delhi's slums
A still from Lockstitch Lives shows a young girl from a family of domestic workers in Katarpuri, Gurgaon, home to several such workers. Pic/Helmstudio
A still from Lockstitch Lives shows a young girl from a family of domestic workers in Katarpuri, Gurgaon, home to several such workers. Pic/Helmstudio
Plug in your earphones and step into Lockstitch Lives to the whir of a sewing machine and a voiceover by researcher Avantee Bansal that introduces the "tangled story" of migrant garment and domestic workers in Delhi NCR's.
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"Most migrant workers end up in cities only to get caught in a repetitive lockstitch of exclusionary urbanisation, struggling to make ends meet…" the melancholic voiceover narrates. From here on, the website (www.lockstitchlives.org) is the full panoply of sounds, photographs and narratives intended to virtually transport audiences to five informal settlements — Dundahera, Sikanderpur Pahadi, Katarpuri, Sikanderpur Basti and Kapashera. Enter houses in each of these areas to have objects tell you tales — how the electricity meters were installed by a temple owner, and a mouse hole plugged with red mud every day, for instance.
Made by Delhi-based HELM (Hands-On Education, Law and Media) Studio in collaboration with Society for Labour and Development, the title of this 'interactive web documentary' — drawn from the most commonly-used mechanical stitch — is telling of the exploitative and hazardous environments that the informal economy lives and works out of in India. In the works for two months, the website was launched on October 17, coinciding with Habitat III (formally known as the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development held in Quito, Ecuador).
"These five settlements have a number of issues — water, sanitation, accessibility to resources, coercive practices by landlords. We shot Lockstitch Lives with the challenge of maintaining the anonymity of the workers," says Rajan Zaveri, a multimedia producer and co-founder of HELM Studio. As the workers were risking their lives by disclosing details of working conditions and sexual harassment, the studio decided to keep them invisible, symbolic also of their economic status; the most we see are their vague portraits made of stitches.
HELM Studio has previously made Virtual Police Station in collaboration with the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative in which you can enter and explore police stations (as an educational tool, but we think it's a good idea to get acquainted for fun too). In the works are interactive documentaries on the illegal blood trade in the country and Mumbai's mills.
Lockstitch Lives, created by a 10-member team, is one of the rare projects which uses 360-degree virtual views to showcase shantytowns rather than picturesque settings. "We depicted urban infrastructure through a series of stitches and kept the actual environment of these slums as photographs. We wanted to juxtapose these two realities," says Mridul Sharma, the creative design director. Sharma, originally a textile designer familiar with Mumbai's mills and sweatshops, believes that the fashion and garment industries need to be made more sustainable and take into account the rights of these workers. "We have read of a worker who was locked up for more than 72 hours in a factory just so that he could meet the deadline for a consignment," adds Sharma.
While projects such as these nearly always run the risk of becoming 'poverty porn' and voyeurism, Zaveri is certain that with these issues, reported too widely in the media to be ignored or romanticised, a spade needs to be called a spade.
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