is a project that transforms the archive into a spatial and visual format, using innovative methods to represent data, and to tell histories and present-day stories of unique geographical and political locations. The project creates ‘zones’ in which a viewer can immerse themselves. Each is an interpretive recreation of a real-life environment that finds itself at the centre of different forces of geo-politics. Zones investigates what the implication are on its people and ecosystems. This simulated reality offers a new way of experiencing the transformation the area is undergoing, as well as its histories and cultures. Moreover, this digital archive can be experienced in more ways than one. The archive of Zones is build through research data and public data, compiled in a game engine it lets the a 'player' explore these areas and learn more about them.
The aim of this project is to let the user draw their own conclusion. Where stories of people are made through collaboration. The trust in traditional news outlets is at an all time low and people are taking their own initiative to find information through social media or otherwise. This model is created with the understanding that to truly learn and interpret the history and the cultural complexity of a region it can be done only through collaboration. By using the tools available at our disposal we can push the limits of how information can be processed. It is to challenge the norms of learning through closed structure methods and replacing it by more dynamic and collaborative ones. The methods of this dynamic and ever-changing mirroring the very nature of history and culture itself.
ZONE 1: Gurez Valley, Kashmir
The border between India and Pakistan is one of the most heavily militarised regions in the world. It divides India and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. As the Line of Control – the LoC, the de facto border between India and Pakistan slips through the mountains, a second, ghostly border runs parallel, called the AIOS or the anti-infiltration obstacle system, which comprises a militarised buffer zone. Between the AIOS and the LoC is a large swathe of land rendered, especially by maps, as empty, voided, as though without life. But this isn’t true. Entire villages are sealed off from the outside world, and from each other, where residents require permits to even cross the length of their neighbourhoods. I am recreating this valley’s landscape and its architecture. I am also trying to piece together the valley’s system and its relationship to the LoC. By entering the immersive environment of Zone 1, people can enter this otherwise impossible to access landscape, and engage with its histories and stories beginning with its relationship to Kashmir, and then to the nation-states of India and Pakistan. Their situation of being on the frontier of a nation that promised progress and while having no say in it. Recently discovered 5.9 million tonnes of lithium has made the area even more crucial and the need to modernisation is urgent and vast underlying effects on the environment and ecology. Through this chapter in this project, I would like to create an archive of their world. To share this experience and open new discourse around it that would have gone unnoticed.
1.1- Project Badamwari
Project Badamwari is a sub-project of Zones, a digital recreation of Badamwari Garden in Srinagar, built in Unreal Engine. It accompanies the book Pleasure Garden – Blackout and the Logic of Crisis in Kashmir by Skye Arundhati Thomas and Izabella Scott, published by MACK Books. As users walk through the virtual garden, they encounter archived media related to the revocation of Kashmir’s
special status. The project similarlly to ‘Zones’ serves as an interactive social and news media archive, preserving historical narratives.