Carving out a niche for nature in a rapidly evolving urban settlement is very challenging. On the one hand, it makes any geography habitable, laying the very streams and pathways for permanent settlement. At the same time, the necessary evil of its erosion is now synonymous with development today. The project intends to document, interpret and visualise the most basic of these interactions, namely between our co-habitants, the changing flora, and the most elemental of resources, water.
As direct ephemera from each site, the student collected and used leaves to make anthotypes of leftovers/signifiers of the cities which have existed on that land. To expand this scope of the foliage, since not all leaves could be printed upon, he has also made cyanotype photograms of commonly occurring vegetation in an area.
Observing texture, Chirantan photographed and superimposed these ‘shadows of the leaves' with microscopic images taken from the immediate surroundings of each specimen. He simulated a single drop in a puddle to capture the form of each liquid and its constituents. The same direct approach was employed when each sample was allowed to harbour and grow seedlings.
Binding the project together is the photo-realistic cyanotype collage, which represents what is, in terms of both being a recent achievement through technology and having an actual residue from each sample collected.
anthotype, cyanotype, delhi, drone, water
