Suchitra Deep

Suchitra Deep is co-founder and partner at Firm Terra Architects, Bangalore, and has led more than a hundred projects as the principal designer. She has been involved in urban issues for over a decade, and is the founder of Malleswaram Social, a group of community-minded residents who have come together to form social connections and help better civic amenities within the area. 

Malleswaram is a 120-year-old, traditional neighbourhood of Bangalore. It has been the bastion of culture, dance and music through the years. Despite the sweeping physical changes that the neighbourhood has undergone, it occupies a special place in the minds and hearts of every old Bangalorean. Suchitra, as a resident of Malleswaram, has been witness to the neighbourhood’s rapid transformation. She contends that planners and politicians make the mistake of reducing the complex, interlinked, ever changing web of physical and non-physical entities of a city to abstractions of plans and numbers. The city is so much more than that.  Embedded within its physical form are memories and patterns. Even when the physical environment of the city, with all its appurtenances – buildings, parks, streets, shops, trees – changes so drastically as to become unrecognisable, they are still present as a lingering memory of joy or sorrow, she mentions in her proposal.  

Enabled by this grant, Suchitra, along with her collaborators Aliyeh Rizvi and Arzu Mistry will facilitate a Memory Mapping Project that seeks to build a collective identity for Malleswaram. Designed by Aliyeh and Arzu, the Memory Mapping Project is a larger initiative mapping various neighbourhoods in the city by using memories and imagination. Suchitra, Aliyeh and Arzu, will lead a workshop that will examine ideas of ownership, identity, and belonging as well as people’s relationship with change. This exercise will go beyond historical documentation, to remain dynamic and rooted in the present. Participants - former or current residents of Malleswaram or anyone interested in the neighbourhood - will be invited to a series of creative mapping exercises over two days. The maps of Malleswaram generated in the process, will feed into the larger mapping project with seven other neighbourhoods of the city, and be compiled into the Artist’s Book of Memory Maps. 

The outcome of this project will be a set of memory maps on Malleswaram. The project’s deliverables to IFA will be photo-documentation of the workshop and a digital copy of the book.

This project is made possible with support from India Foundation for the Arts, under the Project 560 programme and partnered by Citi India.