ALANG
Objects are created for a purpose but occupy a part of the natural environment that causes tension between them and their surroundings.
Man-made superstructures are utilitarian and have a history attached to them. A ship for example, carries within itself many memories and stories. It marks a route from its making to its travels. Against the backdrop of the vast ocean, a ship reminds us of its inconsequential size but the moment it reaches a shore, its mammoth scale is realised against the backdrop of a beach.
This is Alang, a town on the coast of Gujarat where the landscape is dominated, defined and demographically shaped by its industrial function of ship-breaking. It is the last journey of each ship that sets its course for Alang; it has performed its function and is decommissioned.
Once a dysfunctional object like a ship becomes incongruent to its habitat, it is reduced to its materiality. This shifting of material, economies and the act of re-appropriation of an object is a violent yet regenerative one.
Ships come to die at Alang and to be reborn as something else. The photographs contain impressions of a prevailing socio-cultural ecosystem in which unimportant men can aggregate and die so that dead ships live. In the death of a superstructure, there is melancholy, violence and rebirth.
