First draft: Rabia Khan.
SITE INTERVENTION
In Pakistan, the current economic and political situation is unstable due to which a common man has to suffer and face a lot of problems. Hence, my inspiration for the site intervention project was the irregularity of the road running alongside Bilawal House. The road is public property and none has the right to claim it. I explored how the agency of common man is tested, when they are denied their basic rights. The idea behind doing this site intervention is that I use this road to come to Indus Valley everyday and whenever it’s blocked it hinders me and many other people. I incorporated this theme to our site, which essentially is a maze of tress at Bin Qasim Park. The reason I choose this site was that it provided appropriate setting of a network of greenery and pillars. Our medium was the blindfold, which I manipulated. The participants in our project varied from guards of the park to a student, an office-goer, to a driver.
The complexity of the road-blocked situation affects each class hierarchy. However, at times the affluent mend ways to get by someway while the working class suffers. Hence to depict this I used net cloth to blindfold the upper class while the lower class had opaque cloth, rendering them helpless. It’s generally assumed that the lower class is always helpless in such situations while the upper class finds a way through. So, to highlight the class difference we used a different cloth for the lower class to show that they couldn’t see anything because we used an opaque while net was used to blindfold the upper class, which could be seen through, but even then they couldn’t make their way because they couldn’t see anything. The idea of the site intervention and my concept was to show how in such situations everyone is helpless, irrespective of their class. Because even the participants from the upper class were struggling. In my video I put the choice of cloth according to their class. Due to the time restraint I couldn’t add more people to our control group. Their task was to find their way across a network of trees. Each Participant was filmed for 5 minutes length. After watching the video in class and after the feedback I got from the teachers, I realized that I could’ve done a better job with choosing the right participants because our concept and idea of creating a class and to show how everyone has to suffer in the end, didn’t come about that well. For example to show a man or a woman from an upper class family we could have chosen a woman who could be wearing gold jewelry and carrying a designer bag or a business man. Another problem that I realized after the video was being shown was that the idea of choosing different type of clothe as blindfold didn’t work out too well because you can’t tell the difference when you watch the video.
I concluded that each person struggled, in trying to move about our designated area. However, given that the affluent class was wearing a net blindfold their sight was not completely vanished. While the lower class, had more trouble in trying to pave their way through the maze. I determined that the connection between the road and its users is in fact not binary; the prosperous class also gets hindered in this process. Hence during the process of roadblock, both rich and the poor suffer.
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SITE INTERVENTION
Final draft.
The current economic and political situation of Pakistan is quite unstable because of which a common man has to go through a lot of troubles. The site that I chose for my site intervention is the road alongside Bilawal House that has been blocked from public usage due to constant threats to Bilawal House. The reason why I chose this for my site intervention was because I take the same route to come to Indus Valley every day and I experience heavy flow of traffic on the one-sided open road that joins Sea-View to Bilawal Roundabout. Because I experience this problem of heavy traffic of outgoing and incoming traffic on a one way road, I can relate to how, if not everyone, most of the people feel about this problem. Roads are said to the property of the public because they are made from the tax-payers money; if that is the case then who gave these politically sound people the right to block something that does not even belong to them. I believe that this creates a divide amongst the people; it creates a sense of superiority in some and inferiority in some. Once this kind of divide between the elite and the common man is created, it eventually makes the common man forget about their rights and just make their way through their problems. The reason why I’m saying this is that it has been years since the road alongside Bilawal House was blocked from usage of the common man and it still is the same way, nothing has or can be done about it. What happens today is that people fight for their way to get through by the one way road, people face heavy traffic which also sometimes end up in traffic being stuck for hours whereas the road alongside Bilawal House only opens up for ‘VIPs’ thus creating a divide.
The density of the blockage of the road alongside Bilawal House is such that it affects every traveler, be it from any economic background. However, the affluent get their way through the blocked road while the working class suffers using the one-sided road open for incoming and outgoing traffic. Hence to depict this I used a net cloth (through which they had a chance to see through it) to blindfold people from upper economic background while the people from lower economic background had an opaque cloth (through which they had no chance to see through), rendering them helpless. The society that we are living in today, it’s easier for people who are from a sound economic background to get their way through problems compared to people from lower economic background who have to suffer.
So, to highlight the economic background difference, we used a different cloth for the people from lower economic background to show that they couldn’t see anything because we used an opaque while net was used to blindfold people from the upper economic background, which could be seen through, they faced problems trying to see through but eventually it did serve the required purpose. The idea of the site intervention and my concept was to show how in such situations everyone is supposed to feel helpless, if any such situation arises, irrespective of their class but the people from upper economic background try to find a way through their problems whereas people from lower economic background feel helpless and live with it. Because even the participants from the upper class were struggling to see through the netted blindfold, they somehow managed to see through it and made it easy for them to find the pathway. In my video I put the choice of cloth according to their economic background. Due to the time restraint I couldn’t add more people to our control group. Their task was to find their way across a network of trees. Each Participant was filmed for 5 minutes length. After watching the video in class and after the feedback I got from the teachers, I realised that I could’ve done a better job with choosing the right participants because our concept and idea of creating a class and to show how everyone has to suffer in the end, didn’t come about that well. For example, to show a man or a woman from an upper economic background, we could have chosen a woman who could be wearing gold jewellery and carrying a designer bag or a business man. Another problem that I realised after the video was being shown was that the idea of choosing different type of cloth as blindfold didn’t work out too well because you can’t tell the difference when you watch the video.
I concluded that each person struggled, in trying to move about our designated area. However, given that the affluent class was wearing a net blindfold their sight was not completely vanished. While the lower class, had more trouble in trying to pave their way through the trees.
The divide is there, in our society, to eradicate this divide all we need to do put a sense of equality in terms of education and economic background so everyone feels equal. This divide is the basic factor that initially gives birth to problems and then people who can find way to get through it, do and those who can’t due to ‘divide’ reason, live with it.
Hence, proving the fact as in my site intervention that people from the upper economic background do get hindered but they try to find a way to get through the problems that they face whereas people from the lower economic background have to live with it.
Link to the video: https://vimeo.com/114043946
Art and society 